phonemes are given in parentheses. {| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center" |- ! rowspan=2 colspan=2| ! rowspan=2 | Labial ! colspan=3 | Alveolar ! rowspan=2 | Palato-alveolar ! colspan=2 | Velar ! colspan=2 | Uvular ! colspan=2 | Glottal |- ! plain || sibilant || lateral ! plain || labial ! plain || labial ! plain || labial |- ! rowspan=3 | Plosive ! unaspirated | | | | | | | | | | | |- ! aspirated | | | | | | | | | | | |- ! ejective | | | | | | | | | | | |- ! rowspan=2 | Fricative ! voiceless | | | | | | | | | | | |- ! ejective | | | | | | | | | | | |- ! colspan=2 | Sonorant | | | | | | | | | | | |} Nasal consonants assimilating with and the velar and uvular plosives is common among Tlingit-speakers of all dialects. For example, the sequence ng () is often heard as and ngh () as . Native speakers in a teaching position may admonish learners when they produce these assimilated forms, deriding them as "not Tlingit" or "too English", but it is common to later hear such speakers producing those forms themselves. It is uncertain whether this assimilation is autochthonous or if it arose from contact with English, but the former is more likely from a purely-articulatory perspective. Young speakers and second-language learners are increasingly making a voiced/unvoiced distinction between consonants, rather than the traditional unaspirated/aspirated distinction. That is because of the influence of English, which makes a similar distinction. For speakers who make the voiced/unvoiced distinction, the distribution is symmetrical with the unaspirated/aspirated distinction among other speakers. Maddieson, Smith, and Bessel (2001) note that all word final non-ejective stops are phonemically unaspirated. That contrasts with the orthography that typically represents them as aspirated stops: t for the more accurate d . There is a wide variation in ordinary speech, ranging from unreleased to a very delayed aspiration . However, the underlying phoneme is certainly unaspirated since it is consistently produced when the word is suffixed. The orthography usually but not always reflects that: hít "house" is written (du) hídi "(his) house" when marked with the possessive suffix -ÿí. It is possible but has not been verified that aspirated and unaspirated stops are