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Inventory : Vowels, Tones, Consonants :

The phonemic system of Lotha consists of six vowels, three tones and thirty three consonants as follows :

Vowels :	i		u
	e		o

		a

Tones :	Rising	/
	Falling :	\
	Level	_

Consonants :	p		t			k
	p^h		t^h			k^h
		p^f		ts	c
				ts^h	c^h
		pv
		f		s			h
		v		z
	m		n		ñ
	m^h		n^h		ñ^h	^h
				l
				l^h
				r
	w			r^h	y

Vowels-General remarks :

Vowels in Lotha can be described from three dimensions. (1) Jaw height (2) Tongue position (3) Lip position.

1. Jaw height

This refers to the degree of closeness of the lower jaw to the upper jaw. The narrow position is refered to as high and the wide open position is refered to as low, in between there are high mid and low mid. (1) High (2) High mid (3) Mean mid (4) Low types of vowels are found in Lotha at the phonemic level.

2. Tongue Position

This refers to the location of the highest point of the tongue along a horizontal line in the mouth. According to this, there would be following types of vowels.

1. Front 2. Central 3. Back

3. Lip Position

This refers to the amount of rounding or spreading of the lips. On this basis vowels can be distinguished as:

1. Rounded 2. Unrounded

The three way classification of vowels gives following types of vowels for Lotha at the phonemic level.

1. High front unrounded vowel

2. High back rounded vowel

3. Higher mid front unrounded vowel

4. Higher mid back rounded vowel

5. Mean mid central unrounded vowel

6. Low central unrouded vowel

In addition to the simple vowels mentioned above, Lotha has sequences of vowels like [oa], [ao] etc. When these sequences

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