Chukchee is spoken on the peninsula of Chukotka in the far east of Siberia. It is divided into two main dialects, the Eastern dialect spoken by the Maritime Chukchee on the Pacific coast, and the Western dialect spoken by the reindeer-breeders in tundra.
Previous works on the Chukchee phonology include Bogoras(1922, 1934) and Skorik(1961, 1968). However, they described mainly the Eastern dialect, and too little information has been available on the Western dialect. This paper deals with the phonology of the Western dialect of Chukchee, based on my fieldwork conducted during the summers from 1992 to 1995 in the village Rytkuchi and Subdivision No.2 in tundra.
Besides describing the phonemic vowels and consonants, syllable structure, and accent, some morphophonemic phenomena are also treated. They include `assymmetric' vowel harmony, schwa insertion, stem-final vowel deletion, stem-initial and stem-final consonant deletion, and consonant changes, involving assimilation, dissimilation, alternation, and metathesis.
Although the dialectal difference between the Western dialect and the Eastern dialect is slight, they differ in some points, for example, the phonemic consonant inventory, stress, and metathesis. In this paper they are also treated in some detail.
This is only the very first sketch, far from completion, and further fieldwork and study are needed in order to systematically describe the whole picture of the phonology of the Western dialect.
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