Rílin

Rílin is a constructed language created by Margaret Ransdell-Green. It is an a priori, naturalistic fictional conlang, spoken by the Ríli who inhabit the world of Aeniith. It is an agglutinative and fusional language, with a split-ergative verbal alignment system. Word order typically VSO. It is suffixing, has prepositions, a case system for nouns, two noun classes, and a complex system of pronominal verbal endings, which indicate tense, aspect, mode, person, number, clusivity (for 1st person plurals), and three degrees of formality.

Phonology

This phonology is of the Sunuli dialect of Rílin, which is spoken by the group of Ríli who maintained their civilization above ground after the Flight, when the group known as the Lunauli retreated into the denser forests and underground caverns. The Sunuli, by contrast, remained in their original settlements and took up war with the Tosi who had been attacking them for four years. After the first two centuries of cultural and linguistic separation, the Rílin language began to split off into to two mutually intelligible but phonemically and syntactically distinct dialects. The focus of this overview is the Sunuli dialect, but some comparative phonology with Lunauli will be presented.

Phonemic Inventory

Rílin has a fairly large inventory of both consonants (29) and vowels (13). Consonants occur at nine places of articulation and in seven manners of articulation, contrasting voiced vs. voiceless phonemes. Most places and manners of articulation have both a voiced and voiceless version.

	Labial	Labio-dental	Alveolar	Post-alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stop	p b		t d				k g	q
Nasal	m		n				ŋ
Fricative	ɸ β	f v	s z	ʃ	ʂ ʐ		x ɣ		h
Approximate	w					j
Lateral Approximate			l			ʟ
Lateral Fricative			ɬ
Tap			ɾ

Vowels

i ɪ y e ɛ ø æ ɑ~a ɔ o ʌ ɯ u

Minimal Pairs

awu ‘upright’

aɣu 'blind'

aʟu/ 'machete'

uga 'douɡh'

uxa 'axe'

uʟa ‘old woman’

uka ‘companion’

uqa ‘piglet’

da ‘rock’

ɾa ‘cunning’

sa ‘deep’

ʂa ‘supply’

za ‘prostitute’

ʃa ‘petal’

ʐa ‘blizzard’

ta ‘face’

na ‘shame’

la ‘sorrow’

ɬa ‘swing’

pa ‘wrap’

ma ‘mother’

fa ‘cotton’

ɸa ‘breeze’

va ‘corset’

βa ‘energy’

ba ‘father’

wa ‘stretch’

iha ‘plan’

iʔa ‘insect’

imo 'eyelash'

ino 'color'

iŋo 'sugar'

ke ‘hand’

kɛ ‘lettuce’

ko ‘intend’

kɔ ‘tilt the head’

ɾe ‘hot’

ɾɛ ‘write’

ʂy ‘sorrow’

ʃy ‘be.NPRES’