micro blog: The sound of Uyghur
The University of Kansas has a wealth of information available to the public about the Uyghur language, much of which is accessible through their free eTextbook, Greetings from the Teklimakan: a handbook of Modern Uyghur. The text covers a breadth of topics, including the history of the language and its morphology and syntax, and it cites an impressive number of resources that its reader can pursue for further information.
Greetings devotes a section to the phonology of Uyghur as well: its systems of individual sounds which combine together to form meaning. The Uyghur sound inventory is not much more expansive than that of English. It contains 23 consonants and 8 vowels, and relies quite a bit on sound harmony. Three Uyghur consonant sound do not have an English cognate: q, gh, and x. To indicate emphasis, the Uyghurs employ a system of syllable length which typically places the stress on the last syllable. The textbook's authors describe the following three features as key to the sound of Uyghur:
1. Voicing: sounds agree with one another. If a suffix has a "voiced" or "unvoiced" variant, it will match the final sound of the word onto which it is affixed. If a stem ends with a voiced sound, its suffix will begin with one, and vice versa. This is harmonization.
2. Backness: in-keeping with this idea of sound harmony, a sound in Uyghur is identified as either 'back' or 'front' depending on where in the mouth the sound is made. These identical sounds will often pair together in an act of backness harmony; two exceptions being loan words and compound words.
3. Roundedness: the last bit of harmony typical of Uyghur language is that of roundedness. 4 of the Uyghur vowels are rounded, and 4 are unrounded. In a situation where a stem ends in a rounded vowel, its suffix should begin with a similar sound; in a situation where a stem ends in an unrounded vowel, its suffix should also begin with an unrounded vowel.
To further exhibit the detail of the Uyghur sound inventory, I've found a couple of YouTube videos from a speaker of Uyghur on YouTube:
University of Kansas Scholarworks: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/5624/EngYakDwy2009_Uyg1full_10.pdf;sequence=3.
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