Hnyengu

Hnyengu (pronounced ˈɲ̥əŋgu) is another language of my far-future post-apocalypse Antarctican conword, spoken along the Ross Sea coast to the north and west of where Kämpya is spoken. Genetically, it is a Japonic language, however it has been heavily influenced by other languages. In the generations after the initial colonisation, Hnyengu speakers were usually multilingual, and the language absorbed a huge amount of loanwords, especially from English and Spanish. Over the centuries, it continued to be subject to areal influence. A strong Sprachbund has emerged on the Ross Sea coast, and there are also a number of Antarctic areal features.

There are four major dialect groups: Eastern, Central, Southwestern and Northwestern. The Central dialect is spoken in the major city in the region, Myinatu. For a long time it had been the prestige dialect, but after the city was conquered by Kämpya speakers, the inhabitants of the city switched to Kämpya, and within the city there is now a strong stigma attached to the Central dialect of Hnyengu. However, this stigma does not extend to the other dialects, and there is still a large amount of bilingualism between them and Kämpya.

Brief Description

Like modern Japanese, Hnyengu is a topic comment language. However, a succession of sound changes has led to the morphology becoming more fusional.

The morphosyntactic alignment is split ergative (the ergative suffix /-ŋ/ being an erosion of the Japanese genitive /no/). The exact rules of the split vary between dialects, but depend on animacy and relative topicality of the subject.

The TAM system depends on the dialect. Different dialects