Swahili Consonants

The nasal stops are pronounced as separate syllables when they appear before a heterorganic plosive (e.g. mtoto /m.ˈto.to/ 'child') or represent a separate morpheme (e.g. nilimpiga /ni.li.m.ˈpi.ɠa/ 'I hit him'), and prenasalized stops are decomposed into two syllables when the word would otherwise have one (e.g. mbwa /ˈm.bwa/ 'dog'). However, elsewhere this does not happen: ndizi ('banana') has two syllables, /'ndi.zi/, as does nenda /'ne.nda/ (not */ˈnen.da/) 'go'.

The fricatives in parentheses, th dh kh gh, are borrowed from Arabic. Many Swahili speakers pronounce them as /s z h r/, respectively.

Swahili orthography does not distinguish aspirated from tenuis consonants. When nouns in the N-class begin with plosives, they are aspirated (tembo /tembo/ 'palm wine', but tembo /tʰembo/ 'elephant') in some dialects. Otherwise aspirated consonants are not common. Some writers mark aspirated consonants with an apostrophe (t'embo).

Swahili l and r are merged for many speakers (the extent to which this is demonstrated generally depends on the original mother tongue spoken by the individual), and are often both realized as alveolar lateral flap /ɺ/, a sound between a flapped r and an l.

After a nasal prefix, l/r becomes /d/ and w becomes /b/.