Table adopted from Nau (1998:6) Latvian has six vowels, with length as distinctive feature: /ɔ ɔː/, and the diphthongs involving it other than /uɔ/, are confined to loanwords.
This includes the so-called "mixed diphthongs", composed of a short vowel followed by a sonorant.
[2] This system is phonetically more or less similar to the ones found in Lithuanian, Swedish, Norwegian and Serbo-Croatian.
For example, the root Daugav- ('Daugava River') in the nominative case is [dauɡavə], but is pronounced [dauɡaupils] in the city name Daugavpils.
However, when following a vowel that does not form an attested Latvian diphthong (for example, [iu]), [u] is pronounced as a monophthong, as in [zius] ('fish-NOM.SG.