page_title: Scottish Gaelic phonology and orthography
section_title: Morphophonology
hierarchical_section_title: Scottish Gaelic phonology and orthography / Morphophonology
context_page_description: There is no standard variety of Scottish Gaelic; although statements below are about all or most dialects, the north-western dialects are discussed more than others as they represent the majority of speakers.
  Gaelic phonology is characterised by:
  a phoneme inventory particularly rich in sonorant coronal phonemes
  a contrasting set of palatalised and non-palatalised consonants
  strong initial word-stress and vowel reduction in unstressed syllables
  The presence of preaspiration of stops in certain contexts
  falling intonation in most types of sentences, including questions
  lenition and extreme sandhi phenomena
  Due to the geographic concentration of Gaelic speakers along the western seaboard with its numerous islands, Gaelic dialectologists tend to ascribe each island its own dialect. On the mainland, no clear dialect boundaries have been established to date but the main areas are generally assumed to be Argyllshire, Perthshire, Moidart/Ardnamurchan, Wester Ross and Sutherland.
caption: Phonetic realization of regular verbal noun particle