Latgalian phonology

Latgalian language is a Latvian language dialect.

Vowels

 * occurs in complementary distribution with, so that they can be regarded as allophones of a single phoneme.
 * Long are rare and occur only in interjections. The phonological long counterparts of the short  are the diphthongs.
 * There are very few minimal pairs for the opposition. In some dialects,  is simply an allophone of.
 * are phonetically central.
 * Apart from and, there are also vowel+glide sequences , which are very common. Rarer sequences include ,  and , with the last one occurring only in onomatopoeias and loanwords. Phonemically, they are all sequences of two phonemes, rather than proper diphthongs. In some dialects,  and  fall together as .  can also merge with  as.

Stress
The stress is most often on the first syllable.

Tonal accents
There are two phonemic tonal accents in Latgalian, which appear only on long syllables, i.e. those with a long vowel, a diphthong, or a sequence of a short vowel and a sonorant. These are falling (also called level) and broken (also called sharp). However, there are only a handful of minimal (or near-minimal) pairs, such as 'swallow' and  'tomorrow', both written reit.

Phonetically, both of the tonal accents are falling; the falling accent is realized as an even decrease in intensity and pitch, whereas the broken accent is realized as a sudden decrease in intensity and pitch.