be pronounced as a voiced fricative . The prenasalized stops have very short nasalization. The voiceless nasals are actually voiced at the end, as most voiceless nasals are around the world. The preglottalized stops are truly preglottalized, not ejective or creaky voiced. The gammas have been described as fricatives, but here have been placed in the approximant row because of the preglottalized phone and the frequent ambiguity between dorsal fricatives and approximants. In several locations in the Sandu Sui Autonomous County, the preglottalized consonants and the voiceless sonorants do not exist, having merged with the other consonants. Syllable structure is CjVCT, where /j/ may follow one of the labial or coronal consonants, other than (and ) and the affricates. ( occur in recent Chinese loans.) All syllables start with a consonant, unless initial is analyzed as phonetic detail of an initial vowel. The final C is one of . Final plosives are both unphonated (have glottal closure) and are unreleased; the coronal is apical alveolar: . They reduce the tonic possibilities to two, "tones" 7 or 8. Script The Sui script (Sui: le1 sui3, Simplified Chinese: 水书, Traditional Chinese: 水書, Pinyin: Shuǐshū) is a logographic writing system with some pictographic characters that can be used to write the Sui language (Wei 2003:xxix). However, traditionally only shamans were familiar with the writing system, and it is not utilized for everyday use by ordinary Sui people. This system is used for geomancy and divination purposes. There are at least 500 different Sui characters, known as le1 sui3 in the Sui language (Wei 2003:xxix). According to tradition, these characters were created by ljok8 to2 qong5 (Chinese Lù Duógōng 陸鐸公). Some of these characters are pictorial representations, such as of a bird or a fish, and a few are schematic representations of a characteristic quality, such a snail represented by a drawing of an inward curving spiral. Many of these characters appear to be borrowings from Chinese characters and are written backwards, apparently for increased supernatural power. Today, the Sui people use written Chinese for their daily activities. References 張均如，《水語簡誌》，北京：民族出版社，1980。 Stanford, James, Wei Shuqi & Lu Li. 2018. Ecologies of Sui sociolinguistics: A language permeated with rural social structures. In Christine Mallinson and Elizabeth Seale (eds), Rural voices: Language, identity, and social change across place. Lexington Press. 91-103. Castro, Andy and Pan Xingwen. 2014. Sui Dialect Research [水语调查研究]. Guiyang: Guizhou People's Press. Stanford, James.