Vowel quality and duration in Yukon Deg Xinag

1.1 Consonant inventory The inventory of consonants found in Yukon Deg Xinag is given in (1)-(3) in both IPA (in //) and orthographic representations (in ). (1) contains consonants which can occur in syllable-initial position. 3 The Deg Xinag inventory is „large‟ from a cross-linguistic point of view (Maddieson 2005), even when two of the 44 consonants in (1) (/p p h /, found only in loan words) are removed. Compared to other languages of the family, Deg Xinag also has „a rather full Athapaskan consonant system‟ (Krauss 1962). The large number of places of articulation in the Yukon Deg Xinag consonant inventory is due to the fact that the Proto-Athabaskan *s-series has not merged with any other sibilant series in Deg Xinag (Yukon dialect), 4 and the *k y -series has developed into both /k/ and /ʧ/ in an apparently unconditioned split.