Lalo does not use contour for tonal contrast, but instead a difference in voice register is used. Three tones may be described as clear and another two as constricted. The vowel system is quite small, but all vowels have two quite distinct allophones depending on the voice register of the tone. The allophone that occurs with constricted tone is usually one degree more open than the allophone in clear register. The Lalo morpheme is primarily monosyllabic.
Most nouns are dimorphemic, while verbs, adjectives and particles tend to be monomorphemic.
Adverbs quite often feature more than two morphemes, and the rare disyllabic morphemes are mainly found in this category. There is no inflection in Lalo, apart from a very marginal phenomenon of tonal alternations in the pronominal system. The functional load of an inflectional system is instead carried by the particle system. Lalo is a SOV-language, i.e., it places the object before the verbal part of the predicate. Adjectives and quantifiers are placed after the noun.