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Nepali language is the national language of Nepal. Besides being spoken as a mother tongue by more than 48% of the population of Nepal, it is also spoken in Bhutan and India. The language is recognized in the Nepali constitution as an official language of Nepal.
The variety presented here is standard Nepali as spoken in Nepal. There are three major dialects: eastern, central, and western. Though many dialects can be distinguished in Nepal and other South Asian countries, there is reported to be little variation in phonology from one to another.
| +Nepali vowel phonemes ! rowspan="2" | ! colspan="2" Front vowel ! colspan="2" | Central vowel ! colspan="2" | Back vowel |
As the above list shows, there are five nasal vowels. The high mid back vowel does not have a nasal counterpart at the phonological level; although the vowel does exist phonetically in the language, it is often in free variation with its oral counterpart, as in ~ 'short', ~ 'sheep'. Nasal vowels are not frequent in the Nepali lexicon, compared to French in which the number of lexicon with nasal vowels is large. They occur mostly in verbs.
According to , the evidence for the distinctiveness of vowel nasalization is not nearly as strong as that for the distinctiveness of the six oral vowels. They state that minimal pairs are easily obtainable only for the vowel . Examples are shown below:
Other minimal pairs include 'name' vs. 'barber' and 'village' vs. 'sing!' (). At the phonetic level, oral vowels can be nasalized when following a nasal consonant.
followed two diphthongs first elaborated by Shivaraja Acharya in वर्णोच्चारण शिक्षा in 1974.
| कैले |
| जौ |
| भाइ |
| आऊ! |
| सनेई |
| एउटा |
| जीउ |
| पोइ |
| धोऊ! |
| दुई |
Note: final schwas in Indo-Aryan languages are often retained in music and poetry to facilitate singing and recitation. (Refer to "Sayaun Thunga Phulka" and "Jana Gana Mana" for this case.)
| +Nepali consonant phonemesJayaraj, p.19 |
The glides and are nonsyllabic variants of and , respectively. The combination of the labio-velar approximant /w/ and /e, i, o, ʌi̯, r, w, j/ is constrained in Nepali, thus the orthographic ⟨व⟩ is always pronounced as a bilabial stop /b/ in such cases, but only sometimes otherwise. All consonants except have gemination between vowels. Apart from forming lexically distinctive words, as in चपल ('unstable') and चप्पल ('slipper'), gemination also forms the intensive degree of adjectives, as in ('very delicious'), compare ('delicious').
The murmured voice stops may lose their breathy-voice between vowels and word-finally. Non-geminate aspirated and murmured stops may also become fricatives, with /pʰ/ as , /bʱ/ as , /kʰ/ as , and /ɡʱ/ as . Examples of this are 'clean' becoming and 'before' becoming ). Additionally, the bilabial fricatives and can further become labiodental fricatives
are flapped () in postvocalic position. is usually a trill [] but may be a tap [] in intervocalic position.
Typically, sounds transcribed with the retroflex symbols are not purely retroflex but apical postalveolar . Some speakers may use purely retroflex sounds after and , but other speakers use the apical articulation in all positions.
The unvoiced and voiced alveolar affricates are frequently realized as unvoiced and voiced fricatives respectively in intervocallic as well as occasionally in word initial positions. Aspiration is often maintained in the case of aspirated affricates, such as /ad͡zʱʌi̯/ 'still, until now' becoming azʱʌi̯. Additionally, the voiceless fricative s is realized as the voiced fricative z before the voiced stop d in the morpheme boundary.
Nepali syllable structure consists of an optional syllable onset, consisting up to three consonants; an obligatory syllable nucleus, consisting of a vowel; and an optional syllable coda, consisting of one consonant. The following restrictions apply:
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