Phonotactics

Syllable Structure: The ways in which sounds can be combined in a syllable.

Phoneme Inventory: The inventory of sounds in a language.

Phonotactic Constraints: The rules that dictate which sounds can appear in which positions.

Stress Patterns: The way in which syllables are accented in a word.

Tone: The presence or absence of pitch in a language.

Vowel Harmony: Where vowels in a word or phrase have to agree in terms of features like roundedness or height.

Consonant Clusters: Groups of consonants that appear next to each other without a vowel sound.

Onset and Coda: The sounds that appear at the beginning and end of a syllable, respectively.

Sonority Hierarchy: The relative loudness or sonority of speech sounds and their ordering within syllabic structure.

Prosody: The intonation, stress, and rhythm of speech.

Markedness: The idea that some sounds are more difficult to pronounce than others, often because of the way that they are articulated.

Morphophonemics: The study of the ways in which morphemes change their sound when combined with other morphemes.

Phonological Processes: The ways in which phonemes are modified or transformed in spoken language.

Reduplication: Creating new words by repeating an entire syllable or part of one.

Natural classes: Phonemes grouped on the basis of their shared features such as place and manner of articulation.

Consonant Harmony: A type of phonological assimilation where consonants must agree in one or more features.

Long vs short vowels: A feature of binary contrast in which the duration of the vowel is a cue to distinction.

Syllable structure: A syllable is a unit of sound that typically consists of a vowel sound and sometimes one or more consonants that precede or follow it. Syllable structure rules define the permissible combinations of consonants and vowels that may form syllables in a particular language.

Stress placement: Sressed syllables are perceived to have a greater degree of emphasis or prominence than unstressed ones. Different languages have different rules for the placement of stress.

Consonant clusters: Some languages allow multiple consonants to appear in a row, while other languages prefer to avoid such clusters altogether.

Vowel harmony: In some languages, all the vowels in a word must share certain features or properties, such as height or rounding, while in others, vowels may vary independently of each other.

Tone: Many languages use variations in pitch or intonation to distinguish between different words or meanings.

Nasalization: Some languages allow vowels or consonants to be nasalized, which means that air is flowing through the nose while they are being pronounced.

Epenthesis: Some languages allow the introduction of additional sounds, such as vowels, between other sounds in certain contexts.

Deletion and Assimilation: In some languages, certain sounds may be dropped or changed in certain environments, depending on the surrounding sounds.

Length distinctions: Some languages distinguish between long and short vowels or consonants, which can affect syllable structure and stress placement.