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Perhaps the most obvious aspect of any languageis its sound structure, known by linguists as itsPHONOLOGY(phon = 'sound';ology = 'study of').  Nilotic languageshave completely distinct sound systems from Swahili (a Bantu language,ultimately connected to the Niger-Congo family), and from all Indo-Europeanlanguages. Thus, writing systems developed to represent the sounds of Latinor Swahili do not always fare so well in representing Nilotic words. Threesalient aspects of the Maa sound system are its consonants, its vowels,and its tone.

The Maa language has about 25 consonantsounds, written as, and.Dialects may differ in what consonant sounds they have. Thus, Barbara Levergood(1987) describes Arusa Maa as lacking candp; but insteadhaving (sounds which are made by blowingthrough the lips almost as if one were sayingporb).

One must be careful not to assume that letterson paper necessarily represent the same sounds for all languages. The Maasounds written asandng areIMPLOSIVE, meaning that they are pronouncedwhile the speaker draws air into the mouth. All the others areEXPLOSIVE,meaning that air travels out of the mouth while the sound is made. (Byfar, most language sounds around the world are explosive). For Maa, explosivesounds include those written as,though to speakers of other languages, when these sounds occur after anasal sound or between two vowels, one might be tempted to "hear" themlike English'b", "d", "j" and"g," thus perhaps mis-writingen-gitojófor 'hare' (instead of correcten-kitojó; IlWuasinkishuen-kitejó).

The sound written asas in'wild animal,' corresponds to the sound written asng'  inSwahili or ng in Englishsinger (but not theng ofEnglishfinger, nor to the sound written asng in Swahili).Therr is produced by trilling the tip of the tongue against thetop of the mouth (like the rr of Spanish).

What are represented asww(oftenrepresented by wu in practical writing) andyy (yi) can bedescribed phonetically as "strong" or "fortis", more tightly-articulatedversions of the more gently-articulated soundswandy. In Maa, these are clearly distinct sounds, which native speakers use todistinguish words. Compare:
 

Maa has nine distinct vowels. (For some comparison,Swahili and Spanish have only 5; while English arguably has 13.) The Maavowels divide into two sets, depending on whether the tongue root is movedforward (enlarging the throat cavity); or is in a neutral position or movedbackwards (reducing the throat cavity). The size of the throat cavity affectsthe acoustic sound waves that travel through the air, making the soundsdistinct as they are first perceived by the hearer's ear, and then interpretedby the brain. When the tongue root is moved forward, this is referred toas Advanced Tongue Root (+ATR; which Tucker and Mpaayei called "close");when the tongue root is in a neutral or retracted position, the sound isreferred to as Non-advanced or Retracted Tongue Root (-ATR; which Tuckerand Mpaayei called "open") (Figure 3). There is simply nothing like thisdistinction in Swahili or Indo-European languages, and it requires considerablepractice for someone whose first language does not have such sound contraststo learn to reliably recognize, and produce, the difference.

  Many Maa words differ from each other just by a change in theATR value of a vowel. Thus, it is important to represent all nine vowels,which we do here as follows:
 

With these nine symbols, the fact that the following words sound differentcan be represented:
 

To find out more about how thesecontrastingvowels sound, click here.

  A third, extremely important, feature of Maa is its tone. Themeaning of individual Maa words can be changed just by changing the tone(or pitch, i.e., relative acoustic frequencies) on which different syllablesare pronounced.

From a linguistic perspective, Maa has two"basic" tones, High and Low. But these can be combined so that some wordsend with a tone that moves quickly from High to Low and hence is perceivedas Falling. Also, when listening to words in natural context, more thantwo acoustic pitches can be perceived because the tones are affected bysurrounding tone contexts and by the general intonational patterns in sentencesand discourse. In this description, the basic tone patterns are writtenover vowels as Highá and a (word-final), Lowaandà (word-final), and Fallingâ. Much humor,if not much misunderstanding, can arise if the tones across a word areinadvertently changed. The tone is particularly important in the grammar;a bit of this can be appreciated by considering the following simple pairs:
 

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