Antarctican/Sprachbund

As mentioned before, it is much less common for regional varieties of Antarctican to differ in their syntax and phonology. This is because the local languages of Antarctica form a very strong Sprachbund Sprachbund^[*], which have converged to have very similar phonologies and syntactic systems. Some examples of these areal features are:

Phonology

• A pitch register system Register^[*].
• Consonant voicing only being phonemic under certain specific conditions. In particular, a total lack of phonemic voicing of non-coronal fricatives.
• Some kind of fortis / lenis contrast in obstruents, which often interacts with the pitch register system in some way. This contrast may be glottalisation (ejective or implosive), gemination or aspiration.
• Two sets of nasal consonants (this can be plain vs. prestopped, or involve a voicing contrast).
• A very restricted range of syllable shapes.

Morphology

• Ergative-absolutive cas marking on nouns (if any is present at all).
• A complete lack of number agreement on verbs, and no comprehensive marking of plurality on nouns (only ever specific categories of nouns).
• Tense and aspect are not consistently marked on verbs, if they are marked at all.
• A lack of infinitive verb forms. Antarctican languages use a variety of ways to compensate for this.
• Transitivity marked on verbs.

Syntax

• Syntactic ergativity.
• Topic-comment structure to sentences.
• Inclusive and exclusive 'we', with no distinction made between exclusive 'we' and 'I'.
• Head initial syntax.