Acehnese, the language spoken by theAcehnese people ofAceh, Indonesia, has a largevowel inventory compared toIndonesian, with ten oralmonophthong vowels,^[1] twelve oraldiphthongs,^[2] sevennasal monophthong vowels,^[3] and five nasal diphthongs.^[4]

Native-speaking linguists divide vowels in Acehnese into several categories: oral monophthongs, oral diphthongs (which are further divided into the ones ending with /ə/ and with /i/), nasal monophthongs, and nasal diphthongs.^[5]

Oral monophthong vowels in Acehnese are shown in the table below.^[6]

Oral diphthong vowels ending with /ə/ are shown in the table below.^[7]

Oral diphthong vowels ending with /i/ are shown in the table below.^[8]

Nasal monophthong vowels in Acehnese are shown in the table below.^[9]

The table below shows the Acehnese consonant phonemes and the range of their realizations.^[10][11]

Notes:

• The following stop and liquid sound combinations with /h/, as /_h/; are heard as aspirated /pʰ, tʰ, cʰ, kʰ/ or murmured /bʱ, dʱ, ɟʱ, ɡʱ/; /lʱ, rʱ/.
• The fricative /s/ is described byDurie as "a laminal alveo-dental fricative with a wide channel area".^[12]
• The stop /t/ is slightly retroflex.^{[13][page needed]}
• Syllable-final orthographic⟨k⟩ always represents/ʔ/ save in certain recent loans
• Arabic phonemes such as/z/,/f/, and /q/ are often nativised to /d/, /pʰ/, and /k/ respectively. Arabic/ʃ/ and/x/ varies,/ʃ/ can be realised as /c/, /cʰ/, or /s/, and/x/ can be realised as /kʰ/, /k/, or /h/.
• The phoneme /pʰ/ is often articulated as the affricate /ɸ/, Acehnese speakers realise the phoneme /f/ as /ɸ/, both in Arabic and modern loans.^[12]
• The nasals/m/,/n/,/ɲ/,/ŋ/ are realized aspost-oralized nasals (also called "funny nasals") before oral vowels and consonants.^[14][15] They are distinct from the nasal–plosive sequences/mb/,/nd/,/ɲɟ/,/ŋɡ/, e.g. in[banᵈa] 'port' vs[mandum] 'all'.^[16]

Theorthography of Achenese features 31 letters: the 26 letters of thebasic Latin alphabet, è, é, ë, ô, and ö.

• Asyik, Abdul Gani (1982)."The Agreement System in Acehnese"(PDF).Mon-Khmer Studies.11:1–33. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on 20 February 2012.
• Asyik, Abdul Gani (1987).A Contextual Grammar of Acehnese Sentences(PDF) (PhD thesis). The University of Michigan. Archived from the original on 24 July 2011.
• Durie, Mark (1984).A grammar of Acehnese (PhD thesis). Australian National University.doi:10.25911/5d6fa25bcc31c.hdl:1885/138059.
• Lawler, John M. (1977). "A Agrees with B in Achenese: A Problem for Relational Grammar". In Cole, P.; Sacock, J. (eds.).Grammatical Relations. Syntax and Semantics 8. New York: Academic Press. pp. 219–248.doi:10.1163/9789004368866_010.
• Pillai, Stefanie; Yusuf, Yunisrina Qismullah (2012)."An Instrumental Analysis of Acehnese Oral Vowels"(PDF).Language and Linguistics.13 (6):1029–1050. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on 11 October 2017. Retrieved31 October 2014.

• Acehnese language
• Austronesian phonologies

• Use dmy dates from February 2019
• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Use British English from February 2019
• All Wikipedia articles written in British English
• Pages with plain IPA
• Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from July 2025
• CS1: unfit URL