Phonetic Inventory
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Pharyngeal | Glottal | |
| Plosives | p, b, bh [bʱ] | t, d, dh [dʱ] | k, g, gh [gʱ] ky [kʲ], gy [gʲ], ghy [gʲʱ] kw [kʷ], gw [gʷ], ghw [gʷʱ] | ʔ | ||
| Fricatives | s | ɣ [ɣʷ] | ħ | |||
| Approximants | w | r [ɾ], l | y [j] | |||
| Nasals | m | n |
| Front | Back | |
| High | i | u |
| Low | e | o |
[ɣʷ], [ħ], and [ʔ] are collectively called the laryngeals. In many cases they are syllabic, Romanized with a schwa preceding. In daughter languages, they color the quality of nearby vowels and occasionally develop into vowels, but they do not appear as laryngeals in any daughter language. The pronunciations given here are a guess based on the most common way they affect the vowels around them.
The consonants <r>, <l>, <w>, <y>, <m>, and <n> may also be syllabic. For <r>, <l>, <m>, and <n> a schwa is inserted before the letter to indicate this. For <w> and <y>, the syllabic is written as <i> and <u> and is the source of these vowels.
Vowels also have a length distinction with no change in vowel quality. Vowel length is romanized with a macron: ē.
Diphthongs may be formed in any combination of /e/ or /o/ with a glide, i.e. /je/, /ej/, /we/, /ew/, /jo/, /oj/, /wo/, and /ow/.
Stress
Words in Dhməhyēn exhibit stress accent. Stress accent is lexical and may mark a minimal pair in Dhməhyēn. Stress also moves predictably with morphosyntactic transformations. For morphological reasons, a lone /e/ in the word is most likely to receive the stress. While stress will not be marked in the romanization, it will be provided in the IPA for each lexicon entry (when a lexicon is published).
| bhentus [ˈbʱen.tus] | kyolgeh [kʲol.ˈgeħ] | penkwe [ˈpen.kʷe] |
| bhəntēw [bʱn̩.ˈteːw] | kyolgeh [ˈkʲol.geħ] | pelyeh [pel.ˈjeħ] |
| dhoreyeti [dʱo.ˈɾe.je.ti] | mensos [ˈmen.sos] | sōl [ˈsoːl] |
Syllable and Word Structure
The maximum syllable structure in Dhməhyēn is sCCVCC. That is /s/, followed by up to two consonants, which may only be found in the following order with no duplicates of the same class (excepting initial /s/): obstruent – nasal – liquid – glide. A medial vowel is allowed, or a syllabic vowel followed by no more than one additional consonant, romanized əC(C). Diphthongs only form with a glide in one of the consonant positions. The coda may have up to two consonants in the following order: glide – liquid – nasal – fricative – plosive. A laryngeal may occur in any position in a word. A Syllable may be as simple as V, but vowel hiatus is not allowed, and so CV or VC is more likely.
Word initially, a laryngeal may be found at the beginning of the syllable in place of the /s/, and /s/ is allowed word finally beyond the syllable structure given above.