| Description:
The Tonkawa language was spoken in Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico by the Tonkawa people. A language isolate, with no known related languages, Tonkawa is now extinct, and the members of the Tonkawa tribe now speak only English.
Tonkawa has 10 vowels:
Tonkawa has 15 consonants:
An interesting feature of Tonkawan phonology is that the vowels in even-numbered syllables are reduced. That is, long vowels are shortened, while short vowels disappear.
The orthography used on the Tonkawa Tribe's website is very similar to Americanist phonetic notation.
Long vowels are indicated with a following middle dot . The affricate /ts/ is written as . The glottal stop /ʔ/ is written as either an apostrophe or with a superscript question mark . The palatal glide /j/ is written as .
The phonemic orthography used in Hoijer's Tonkawa Texts is a later version of Americanist transcription. It uses a colon for long vowels and the traditional glottal stop symbol . some of the examples of it would be like salt it is called mummun and peper is mummunchicew
The following text is the first four sentences of Coyote and Jackrabbit, from Hoijer's Tonkawa Texts.
Gloss:
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