The phonology of Acehnese varies between dialects and can cause difficulties in communication. This article mainly focuses on the Peusangan dialect, which is considered to be the standard variety of Acehnese, other dialects will be explicitly mentioned.
The table below shows the Acehnese consonant phonemes and the range of their realizations, non-standard phonemes are shown in brackets.
The following table shows typical examples of the occurrence of the above consonant phonemes in words, using minimal pairs where possible.
Acehnese has three consonant glides: /h/, /r/, and /l/.
Native-speaking linguists divide vowels in Acehnese into several categories: oral monophthongs, oral diphthongs (which are further divided into the ones ending with /ÃÂ/ and with /i/), nasal monophthongs, and nasal diphthongs.
Oral monophthong vowels in Acehnese are shown in the table below.
Oral diphthong vowels ending with /ÃÂ/ are shown in the table below.
Oral diphthong vowels ending with /i/ are shown in the table below.
Nasal monophthong vowels in Acehnese are shown in the table below.
The orthography of Achenese features 31 letters: the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet, è, é, ë, ô, and ö.