The sounds

of Ket can be quite complicated. Ket has no official writing system in the Roman alphabet, so I have chosen to make my own for this site. Ket has 12 consonant phonemes (distinct, contrasting sounds), and these are represented by 12 letters (actually, 11 letters and one "digraph", ng): b, d, h, j, k, l, m, n, ng, q, s, and t. Ket has 7 different vowel phonemes, represented by 7 letters: a, e, i, o, u, y, and w. Note that on this website, y and w ALWAYS REPRESENT VOWELS!

Ket is also a tonal language, meaning that instead of giving one syllable stress, a Ket word has a distinctive pitch. Unlike some tonal languages, though, Ket is word-tonal, meaning the entire word carries a tone. Ket has 5 tones: glottalized, high-even, falling, rising-ralling, and rising-high falling. Each of these five can be on any of the seven vowels.

1: Introduction
2: b, d, h
3: j, k, l
4: m, n, ng
5: q, s, t
6: a, and tones
7: e, i, o
8: u, y, w
9: More tones

An alphabet

based on the Cyrillic script has been used since 1988, and has seen modest success. It uses 39 letters. In the 1920s, an attempt was made to popularize a Latin alphabet to write Ket, but the Soviet government banned the movement. Thus, no standard Latin orthography exists today for Ket.