Alaia

Alaia
alaia
Pronunciation	[[Help:IPA|aˈla.ja]]
Created by	Serafín
Date	2015
Native to	Kingdom of Senjana
Native speakers	5 million ()
Language family	Odolic Alaia
Early forms	Proto-Odolic Old Alaia
Dialects	Iknapu (most prestigious) Ammaka Arpate Keassu Sili Atta Ulpane Vedeti
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

A language within brackets in superscript form means that the previously mentioned characteristic is found in an identical or similar way in that language. For example, "^{Xhosa}" stands for "something identical/similar exists in Xhosa". This is for people interested in those natlangs, and may even help justifying the naturalness of the conlang (but just "may").

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 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.

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.

Typological overview dump

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. 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.

Phonemic Inventory

The phonemic inventory of the prestige dialect of Iknapu 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.

All consonants can appear long except for r.

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 at all.

Morphology

Every single content word (noun, adjective, verb, adverb) must be at least two syllables long.^{Xhosa}

-show sample noun, adjective and verb inflection

-show a comprehensive list of the derivational morphemes, putting the ones derived from body parts apart. include examples

Syntax

-show the duodecimal-ish number system

-show the contexts where adjectives gain the inflection of nouns