The phoneme inventory below shows every sound that functions as a meaningful unit in PO-AI — a Tai-Kadai language spoken in Eurasia . With 35 phonemes, it has an average-sized inventory compared to the world's languages. Sounds marked with a dashed border (*) are marginal: they appear only in loanwords or highly specialized contexts and are not part of the core phonological system.
Consonants
approximant
sibilant fricative
Vowels
* Marginal phoneme — occurs only in loanwords or rare contexts.
How large is this inventory?
PO-AI has 35 phonemes, placing it in the 46th percentile of languages by inventory size — roughly average for a human language.
Compared to English
For English speakers learning PO-AI, these are the sounds that will require the most focused practice.
In PO-AI, not in English (23)
These sounds don't exist in English — English speakers will need to learn them from scratch.
Most phonologically similar languages
Ranked by Jaccard similarity — the proportion of phonemes shared relative to the combined inventory of both languages.
Compare PO-AI with another language
See which sounds are shared and which are unique.