Maemish
| Maemish | |
|---|---|
| Mąemōlha mąjba | |
| Pronunciation | [ˈmɑ̃e̯.moːl.xɑ ˈmɑ̃j.bɑ] |
| Created by | Highqlt |
| Setting | Northern Europe |
Isolate
| |
Maemish (mąemōlha mąjba lit. tongue of the people) is a Pre-Indo-European linguistic isolate spoken in Southern Scandinavia by about 500 speakers. The classical or literary language, which covered a wider area including Northern Germany, flourished in the Middle Ages, but the language started to dwindle as a spoken language by around 1700. The language is not considered endangered as parents still teach their children the original language, albeit mostly alongside Swedish.
Phonology
Consonants
| Bilabial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ||||||||
| Stop | p | b | t | d | k | g | ||||
| Fricative | ɸ | θ | s | z | x | |||||
| Approximant | j | |||||||||
| Trill | r | |||||||||
| Lateral approximant | l | |||||||||
Vowels
Vowel inventory: e i u ɑ ɑ̃ ɔː ɔːː ɛː
Orthography
The language was originally written with the Runic script, in some of its oldest texts. However, the Latin script was used during the Classical period. Nowadays, the script used is mostly a Swedish-based variant of the Latin alphabet.
Majmska
Majmska (Maem Swedish) is a dialect of Swedish heavily influenced by Maemish. It is grammatically the same as Swedish, but it uses the phonology as well as a few Vocabulary items from Maemish.