A preliminary study of Sherdukpen phonology

This paper is a preliminary description of the phonology of Sherdukpen language, which is spoken in Rupa, a valley town in the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh. Sherdukpen is a highly endangered language with a population of around 4000 speakers in total (Eberhard et al. 2021). The language has not been adequately described and documented yet (cf. Jacquesson 2015). The analysis of the language is based on the data collected in my recent field visit to Rupa in December 2021. This paper presents a description of the segmental inventories and the syllable structure of Sherdukpen. The consonant inventory consists of 23 consonants. Twelve of them are plosives, six fricatives, three approximants, three nasals and a trill. There are three series of stops: voiced, voiceless and voiceless aspirated. Sherdukpen has twenty two vowels among which five of them are nasal vowels five are secondary and one nasal secondary vowels.