Typical of Western Kru languages, Wobé has sixteen vowel phonemes, with nine oral vowels and seven nasal vowels, and seventeen consonant phonemes. Wobé words tend not to have diphthongs, but rather the (up to) three vowels in a native non-compound word are pronounced separately.
Wobé is known for claims that it has the largest number of tones (fourteen) of any language in the world.[2] However, other researchers has not confirmed this, many of whom believe that some of these will turn out to be sequences of tones or prosodic effects,[3][4][5] though the Wèè languages in general do have extraordinarily large tone systems.
^Newman, Paul (1986). "Contour Tones in Grebo". In van der Hulst, Harry; Bogers, Koen; Mous, Marten (eds.). The Phonological Representation of Suprasegmentals. Publications in African Languages and Linguistics (Book 4). De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 190–191 (notes 12 and 14).
^Newman believes Singler is a valuable counterweight to Bearth & Link, but does not accept all his criticism; he accept the Wobe 43 toneme, for example, but believes it should be analyzed as /32/ (all tones being off by 1 compared to related dialects).
