Latvian phonology
Introduction This article is about the '''phonology of the Latvian language'''. It deals with synchronic phonology as well as phonetics.
Consonants Table adopted from  Labial Dental/Alveolar Palatal/Postalveolar Velar Nasal         Stop             Affricate       Fricative ()         ()  Approximant         Trill    ()*  are denti-alveolar, while  are alveolar. * The consonant sounds  are only found in loanwords. *  is only an allophone of nasals before velars  and . * Latvian plosives are not aspirated (unlike in English). * Voiced and unvoiced consonants assimilate to the subsequent consonant, e.g. or  . At the same time single voiced consonants (, , ,  etc.) are not devoiced word-finally:  ,  . * Doubled consonants are pronounced longer:  . The same occurs with plosives and fricatives located between two short vowels, as in  , and with  that is pronounced as , and  and  as . * A palatalized dental trill  is still used in some dialects (mainly outside Latvia) but quite rarely, and hence the corresponding letter  was removed from the alphabet.
Vowels Latvian has six vowels, with length as distinctive feature:+ Latvian vowels Front Central Back short  long short  long short  long Close       Mid    ()  () Open      , and the diphthongs involving it other than , are confined to loanwords.The vowel length ratio is about 1:2.5.Vowel length is phonemic and plays an important role in the language. For example,   means 'made of wood',   means 'on the tree';   means 'a drop', and   means 'a duck'.Latvian also has 10 diphthongs (), although some diphthongs are mostly limited to proper names and interjections.
Pitch accent Standard Latvian and, with a few minor exceptions, all of the Latvian dialects, have fixed initial stress. Long vowels and diphthongs have a tone, regardless of their position in the word. This includes the so-called "mixed diphthongs", composed of a short vowel followed by a sonorant. There are three types of tones:; level (also drawling, sustained) tone (): high throughout the syllable: e.g.,   ('spring onion'); falling tone (): brief rise followed by a long fall: e.g.,   ('arch') (pronounced ''lùoks''); broken tone (''lauztā intonācija''): rising tone followed by falling tone with interruption in the middle or some creakiness in the voice: e.g.,   ('window')Besides the three-tone system of the standard variety, there are also Latvian dialects with only two tones: in western parts of Latvia, the falling tone has merged with the broken tone, while in eastern parts of Latvia the level tone has merged with the falling tone. Hence, the Central Latvian , ,  correspond to Western Latvian , , , and to Eastern Latvian , , .This system is phonetically more or less similar to the ones found in Lithuanian, Swedish, Norwegian and Serbo-Croatian. The broken tone has some similarity to the Danish stød.
Alternations Latvian roots may alternate between  and  depending on whether the following segment is a vowel or a consonant. For example, the root  ('Daugava River') in the nominative case is , but is pronounced  in the city name . In this example, the vocalic alternant  is realized as the off-glide of the diphthong . However, when following a vowel that does not form an attested Latvian diphthong (for example, ),  is pronounced as a monophthong, as in  ('fish-NOM.SG. '; cf. 'fish-NOM.PL. ').
Notes
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