Alaia

Alaia
alaia
Pronunciation	[[Help:IPA|aˈla.ja]]
Created by	Serafín
Date	2015
Native to	Kingdom of Senjana
Native speakers	5 million (2015)
Language family	Odolic Alaia
Early forms	Proto-Odolic Old Alaia
Dialects	Iknapu (most prestigious) Ammaka Arpate Keassu Sili Atta Ulpane Vedeti
Sources	b
Official status
Regulated by	None. Spelling largely follows pronunciation of the most prestigious dialect. The language of a few rather recent authors is deemed worth imitating.
Language codes
ISO 639-3	none

Alaia is a conlang that started being created by user Serafín in 2015. It is the latest iteration of a series of similar conlangs, beginning with the conlang "Meftla" in 2009. It is mostly influenced by Latin and Standard Arabic in all aspects except for the lexicon, though many particular details have also been taken from, or inspired by, many other languages. The lexicon is a priori, and the author has done his best to not imitate the lexical structure of any of the languages he's familiar with.

In-universe, Alaia is a language spoken by nearly 5 million people in the Kingdom of Senjana, a kingdom that is based on a territory mostly composed of deserts with little life, but where a civilization flourished around its lake and along some of its rivers. Although the language is documented from as far back as nine centuries before the "current" stage (for this article), literacy was limited to a very few (not even much of the upper class knew how to write), and only became more widespread during the last century.

The prestige dialect of Alaia has 19 consonants, 4 monophthongs and 5 diphthongs. Words are always stressed on the penultimate syllable, and have a syllabic structure of (C)(C)V(C)(C) strongly adhering to the sonority hierarchy. Every single content word must be at least two syllables long. Alaia's inflectional morphology uses suffixes exclusively, while derivational morphology makes use of prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes. Nouns inflect for four cases and two numbers, adjectives for gender and sometimes case and number as well, and verbs for 7 TAMs plus one non-finite form. Alaia's neutral word order is SOV. It has both prepositions and postpositions, adjectives and genitives usually precede nouns, and relative clauses follow nouns. Negation is achieved with a preverbal particle, subordination always by a subordinator. It is strongly dependent-marking. It is by far the most successful of the Odolic languages.

Phonology

The phonemic inventory is shown in the following tables.

Consonant phonemes

		Labial	Dental/Alveolar	Postalveolar	Velar
Plosives/Affricate	Voiceless	p	t	c [tʃ]	k
	Voiced	b	d	j [dʒ]	g
Nasal		m	n
Fricative	Voiceless	f	s	sh [ʃ]	x
	Voiced	v	z	(zh [ʒ])1
Rhotic			r [r ~ ɾ]2
Lateral			l

¹/ʒ/ is a marginal phoneme, mostly used in borrowings and in words used in the standard language borrowed from dialects.
²[ɾ] is the most common allophone of /r/ in syllable-final position, although [r] can also appear there. [r] is used in all other phonological contexts.

Vowel monophthong phonemes

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e [e ~ ə]1
Low		a

¹/e/ is pronounced [e] in stressed syllables, [ə] in unstressed ones.

Falling diphthong phonemes

Falling to i	ei [ei ~ əi]1	ai	ui
Falling to u	eu	au

¹/ei/ is pronounced [ei] in stressed syllables, [əi] in unstressed ones. The prestige dialect does not have any rising diphthongs.