Oromo language
Consonant and vowel phonemes

Like most other Ethiopian languages, whether Semitic, Cushitic, or Omotic, Oromo has a set of ejective consonants, that is, voiceless stops or affricates that are accompanied by glottalization and an explosive burst of air. Oromo has another glottalized phone that is more unusual, an implosive retroflex stop, "dh" in Oromo orthography, a sound that is like an English "d" produced with the tongue curled back slightly and with the air drawn in so that a glottal stop is heard before the following vowel begins. It is retroflex in most dialects, though it is not strongly implosive and may reduce to a flap between vowels. One source describes it as voiceless.

Oromo has the typical Eastern Cushitic set of five short and five long vowels, indicated in the orthography by doubling the five vowel letters. The difference in length is contrastive, for example, hara 'lake', haaraa 'new'. Gemination is also significant in Oromo. That is, consonant length can distinguish words from one another, for example, badaa 'bad', baddaa 'highland'.

In the Qubee alphabet, letters include the digraphs ch, dh, ny, ph, sh. Gemination is not obligatorily marked for digraphs, though some writers indicate it by doubling the first element: qopphaa'uu 'be prepared'. In the charts below, the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for a phoneme is shown in brackets where it differs from the Oromo letter. The phonemes /p v z/ appear in parentheses because they are only found in recently adopted words. There have been minor changes in the orthography since it was first adopted: ⟨ x ⟩ () was originally rendered ⟨ th ⟩, and there has been some confusion among authors in the use of ⟨ c ⟩ and ⟨ ch ⟩ in representing the phonemes / tʃʼ / and / tʃ /, with some early works using ⟨ c ⟩ for / tʃ / and ⟨ ch ⟩ for / tʃʼ / and even ⟨ c ⟩ for different phonemes depending on where it appears in a word. This article uses ⟨ c ⟩ consistently for / tʃʼ / and ⟨ ch ⟩ for / tʃ /.
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