Kämpya

Kämpya is spoken is my far-future Antarctican conworld, where runaway global warming has melted the icecaps and made the continent habitable (while rendering most of the rest of the world uninhabitable).

It originated from the area around Ross Island, one of the first large-scale colonies on Antarctica. The founders of the settlement were a mostly either Burmese, Australian or Taiwanese, and as such Kämpya is most heavily influenced by the languages of those countries (especially Burmese). However, a later wave of Spanish speaking migrants from South America also had a large impact on the language.

It has since spread to other parts of the continent, aided by the spread of a religion called Laikyâr (although far from all Kämpya speakers follow the Laikyâr religion).

Brief Description

Kämpya has topic comment syntax with isolating morphology. It belongs to category 4 in Milewski's typology [1] i.e. it uses the same marker (the clitic -i) to mark both possessors and ergative subjects. Possessors are marked for alienability [2] using tone, and come before the nouns they modify. Kämpya uses postpositions rather than prepositions, and adjectives can come either before or after the nouns they modif if they are restrictive or non-restrictive respectively [3].

In terms of phonology, the most notable thing is a 3-way phonation contrast on stressed syllables (which is not present on unstressed syllables). Kämpya distinguishes words with harsh voice (marked with a tilde e.g. /a̰/), from breathy voice (marked with a pair of dots either above or below the vowel e.g. /a̤/ or /ä/), from glottalisation (marked with a glottal stop after the vowel e.g. /aʔ/.

There are many minimal pairs of words that only contrast stress and phonation e.g. /síˈtâ̰/ - "wing" vs. /ˈsíʔtà/ - "guardian" vs. /ˈsì̤tà/ - "sister", or /áˈlôṵn/ - "that which is alone" vs. /áˈlòṳn/ - "everything / everyone".

In addition to this, there is also a tone contrast, but this is only used for grammatical purposes (e.g. to change between different parts of speech, or to mark alienable / inalienable possession), never for lexical purposes. For example, from the nouns /síˈtâ̰/ - "wing" and /áˈlôṵn/ - "that which is alone", which both have High Tone on the first syllable and Low Tone on the second (with harsh voice), we can derive the non-restrictive adjectives /sìˈtá̰/ - "wing" and /àˈlóṵn/ - "by itself / solitary", which both have Low Tone on the first syllable and High Tone on the second (with harsh voice).

It is usually written using a script based on the Burmese alphabet.