The Atong people are members of the Garo Scheduled Tribe, whose official Scheduled tribe language is Garo. Garo has a standardised form of speech used in education, administration, the press and literature. Linguistically speaking, Atong and Standard Garo may be different languages, given that they have different sound systems, vocabulary and grammar. However, due to the fact that most Atongs are bilingual in Standard Garo to various degrees, intelligibility is one-way: Atong speakers understand Standard Garo but speakers of Standard Garo may not understand Atong. Phonology The phonemes of Atong are given in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in Table 1. That table also presents how the phonemes are written in the Atong alphabet used for everyday writing by people who are not linguists. As we can see in the table, the glottal stop can be written with either a bullet or an apostrophe. The bullet was used by missionaries to write the glottal stop in Garo when the writing system for that language was created in the 1800s. The apostrophe has since been adopted to write the glottal stop as it is available on all computer keyboards. The vowel phoneme is written in the orthography, as it is in Khasi and Welsh. It was the Welsh Presbyterians that developed the Khasi writing system and used the letter to write the phoneme in Khasi. The consonant phoneme has aspirated and non-aspirated pronunciations [sʰ ~ s]. The aspirated allophone , occurs at the beginning of a syllable, while the unaspirated occurs the end of a syllable. Both phonemes are written with the letter . Aspirated also occurs in other Asian languages such as Burmese and Korean. Glottalization Glottalization in Atong is a feature that operates on the level of the syllable, and that manifests itself as a glottal stop at the end of the syllable. Glottalization only affects open syllables and syllables ending in a continuant or a vowel. In the following examples, glottalized syllables are indicated by a following bullet. The pronunciation is given between square brackets where the symbol represents the glottal stop and the full stop represents the syllable boundary. In the examples below, the following abbreviations are used: COS 'change of state', CUST 'customary aspect', INCOM 'incompletive aspect', NEG 'negative', If the glottalized continuant is followed by a consonant, the glottalized phoneme is not released, i.e. man’ -khu-cha (be.able-INCOM-NEG)‘is not yet possible’. If the glottalized continuant is followed