The original centre of Kanienʼkehá:ka territory was in Eastern New York State, but since then, the people also live in southern Ontario and south-western Québec.

Their writing system is rather different than other northern Iroquoian languages in that nasal vowels are written with an ‹n› instead of a nasal hook or diæresis.

Note: There are several Roman Orthography conventions on this site that may require further explanation. On the charts below, there is lots of phonetic terminology that may not be familiar to everyone.  

Consonants

Vowels

Notes

• High tone is marked with an acute accent ‹á›, falling tone with a grave accent ‹à›. Vowel length is written with a colon ‹:›.
• The consonant combination /ts/~/tsy/ is pronounced [dz] in the eastern dialect, and [dʒ] in central and western dialects.
• /ts/~/tsy/ and /kw/ can in some instances be considered single phonemes.
• /t/, /k/, and /s/ are voiced before the vowel sounds and before /y/ and /w/. So ‹kaná:ta› is pronounced [gana:da]. Some speakers of western dialects might not voice the /s/ in this environment.
• /hsi/ is pronounced [ʃi] (English “she”) in central and western dialects, and /hsy/ is pronounced [ʃ] (English “sh”) in all dialects.
• Eastern communities use ‹i› for the "y" sound [j], whereas some speakers in Ontario prefer ‹y›.
• Some Ahkwesáhsne speakers pronounce the /r/ phoneme as [l].
• Consonants followed by an ‹h› are pronounced as follows
  • ‹kh› is [kʰ] as in “steakhouse”
  • ‹sh› is [s] as in “misshap”
  • ‹th› is [tʰ] as in “thyme”
  • ‹wh› is [f] as in “fall”
• The glottal stop is frequently not written at the end of words.
• The vowel ‹en› is a nasal version of the English short ŭ as in the affirmative “uh-huh”
• The vowel ‹on› is a nasal version of the English long o͞o as in “noon”.
• Some writers underline the ṉ to disambiguate en (the nasal vowel [ʌ̃]) and eṉ (two separate sounds [en]), and on (the nasal vowel [ũ]) and oṉ (two separate sounds [on]),.

Last Update: August 21, 2008