The phonology of Kurukh (also spelled as Kurux or Oraon), a North Dravidian language spoken by the Kurukh (Oraon) and Kisan people of East India, consists of a six-to-eleven vowel system with short and long pairs, along with a consonant inventory that separates dental and retroflex sounds. A clear identifying feature of the language within the North Dravidian branch is the sound change that created the voiceless velar fricative . This phonetic breakdown is based on the historical work of Martin Pfeiffer (1972), alongside early data from Pinnow (1964) and Grignard (1924).
Vowels Kurukh uses between six and eleven vowel sounds. The first table is the one given by Pfeiffer (1972), and the second one is given by Lakra and Rahman (2016).
+ Vowels Front Central Back short long short long short long Close Mid Open
Pfeiffer notes that long vowels are to interpreted as a sequence of two short ones. He adds that, while a previous researcher asserts that does not exist, it is found in at least eight words, and that becomes in the past tense. Nasalization is also common for most vowels (like or ), but historically it does not happen with the schwa.
+ Vowels Front Central Back short long short long short long Close Mid Open
Consonants The native consonant sounds match standard Dravidian family lines, though some liquid sounds like laterals have merged over time.
+ Consonants Bilabial Dental/Alveolar Retroflex Postalveolar / Palatal Velar Glottal Nasal () Stop / Affricate ~ ~ Fricative Sibilant Trill / Flap () Approximant
The velar fricative comes from the original Proto-Dravidian stop /*k-/ under certain sound environments. In daily speech, this sound naturally changes to a uvular fricative whenever it is pronounced next to back vowels like /u/ or /o/.
The retroflex nasal is not a separate independent sound; it is an allophone that only appears when placed right before other retroflex stops. Also, while aspirated sounds are common in the vocabulary, they only appear in words borrowed from Indo-Aryan languages and are not part of the original core Dravidian roots.
Phonotactics Native Kurukh roots only allow double (geminate) consonants right after short vowels, like in the word palla ('tooth'). Roots that have a long vowel are normally followed by single consonants.
Extra vowels are often added to break up difficult consonant clusters at the end of a root word, which creates forms like xeexᵉl ('earth'). These extra helper vowels naturally drop out whenever a suffix starting with a vowel is added, which can be seen in the accusative form xeexl-an.
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