Assamese

Assamese is the main official language of the state of Assam in Northeast India. It is an Eastern Indo-Aryan related to Bengali and Odia.

Main Vowels

The inherent short vowel in Hindi is often described as a shwa /ə/, though the phonetic realization is typically lower as [ɐ]. The distinction between it and its long counterpart /a:/ is typically neutralized in word-final position to [a].

The Sanskrit distinction between short-long counterparts for /i/ and /u/ is lost in Assamese, but still spelled out in the writing system where etymologically appropriate.

The vowel ऋ <r̥> in Sanskrit originally represented a syllabic liquid like /ɹ̩/, in modern Assamese this is pronounced as a sequence /ɹi/ in words directly derived from Sanskrit, which is not a different vowel from /i/, but the original Sanskrit vowel letter is still indicated in the spelling.

Assamese does not distinguish the retroflex and dental coronals as is typical of most Indo-Aryan languages, having merged both sets together into an alveolar series.

Assamese shifted the three sibilants to velar /x/, and subsequently shifted the palatal series plosives to /s/ and /z/.

Other Vowels and Vowel-like Marks

ং indicates a velar nasal /ŋ/ (in Lexx Rom romanized as ṅ same as ঙ).

ঁ indicates nasalization of the vowel.

ঃ represents /h/ after a vowel, with an optional echo of the vowel afterwards as well. is used only in words derived directly from Sanskrit, romanized as ḥ.

There are also some other Sanskrit syllabic liquid vowel letters that are extremely rare, even in Sanskrit:

These letters will practically never be encountered in written Assamese unless one is reading specifically about Sanskrit.