This article sets out a phonemic and tonal analysis of the second author’s native language: the (heretofore undescribed) Naxi dialect spoken in the village of Pianding (Dadong County, Lijiang Municipality, Yunnan). A distributional inventory brings out two pairs of phonemes that are of special interest to Naxi dialectology: (i) two apicalized vowels, /ɿ̟/ and /ɿ̠/, and (ii) two rhotic vowels, /ɚ/ and /ɯ˞/, instead of only one apicalized vowel and one rhotic vowel in Lijiang Old Town (Dayanzhen), the best-described dialect to date. These observations confirm and complement reports from other dialects; information on the lexical distribution of these conservative oppositions enriches the empirical basis for comparative-historical studies within the Naish subgroup of Sino-Tibetan. In the course of the discussion, observations about the Pianding dialect are placed in cross-dialect perspective; this article can thus serve as an introduction to key aspects of Naxi phonemics.