Ayacucho Quechua has three vowels: /a/, /i/, and /u/, which are rendered by native speakers as [æ], [ɪ], and [ʊ] respectively.
When these vowels appear adjacent to the uvular fricative /χ/, they are lowered (with [æ] instead being produced further back), yielding [ɑ], [ɛ], and [ɔ] respectively.
All phonemes appear in word initial position, though vowel clusters are not allowed, and word initial consonant clusters occur only in words borrowed from Spanish (these clusters are bl-, br-, bw-, by-, pl-, pr-, pw-, py-, dy, dr-, ty-, tr-, gr-, gl-, gw-, kr-, kl-, kw-, fr-, fl-, sp-, sk-, "st"-, "sw"- and sy-).
Ayacucho Quechua substantives are marked for eleven grammatical cases, which are also conveyed through the use of suffixes.
However, even the subject markers are preceded by the suffixes -wa and -su which indirectly convey the direct object of the verb, as in riku-wa-n-ki 'You see me'.
Blocks which are left empty are either instances in which the object is the same as the subject, which requires the reflexive marker -ku-, as in riku-ku-y 'I saw myself', or cases where such a statement is logically impossible, as in the intersection between a second person subject and a first person plural inclusive object, which would mean, approximately 'You helped you and I'.
Ayacucho Quechua has a standard subject–object–verb (SOV) word order, as in (pay) wasitam ruwachkan 'he is building a house', but this can be inverted, since the syntactic relationship between nouns is made clear by the overt case markers.