The following chart gives the Cebuano phonemes and the articulation:
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| Consonants |
+---------------+--------+--------------+-------+------+-------+
| |bilabial|apico-alveolar|palatal|dorsal|glottal|
| | | | | | |
|voiceless stops| p | t | c | k | ʔ |
|voiced stops | b | d | j | g | |
|nasals | m | n | | ŋ | |
|spirants | | s | | | h |
|liquids | w | l, r | y | | |
+---------------+--------+--------------+-------+------+-------+
| Vowels |
+----------------------+---------------+-----------------------+
| high- or mid-front | low central | high- or mid-back |
| i | a | u |
+----------------------+---------------+-----------------------+
In addition there is a fourth mid-central vowel which occurs
dialectally (Bohol, Southern Leyte, Southern Cebu, and other scattered
areas) but is not found in the dialect of Cebu City and is not
transcribed here. [7] The palatal stop /j/ in many dialects does not
contrast with the cluster /dy/. In the dialect of the Camotes Islands
there is also a voiced spirant /z/ which derives historically from /y/
but contrasts with /y/ currently.
Vowels may be long or short. Contrast between long and short vowels
occurs only in the final and the penultimate syllable of the word:
káun [kā́ʔun] ‘eat’ and nagdá [nagdā́] ‘is bringing’.
Further, there is only one long vowel per word. There is also a phoneme
of stress which has a very low contrastive function. For the most part
stress can be determined by the phonological make-up of the word: 1
stress falls on the long vowel of the word if the word has a long
vowel: nagdá [nagdā́], káun [kā́ʔun]. 2 for words that have no
long vowel, stress is on the penultimate if it is closed: tan-aw
[tánʔaw] ‘see’; mugbù [múgbuʔ] ‘short’. If the penultimate
is open and short, stress is on the ultimate: mala [malá] ‘dry’.
Occasionally, in words with a closed penult the final syllable is
stressed (marked here with a wedge): mandǎr [mandár] ‘order’;
dughǐt [dughít] ‘instrument for poking’. In words with a long
vowel in the ultimate syllable there is, in some dialects, a contrast
between the stress on the first mora and stress on the second mora of
the long vowel: nahū́g [nahúug] ‘fell’; húg [huúg] ‘woof’.
This contrast does not obtain in all dialects.