Zudakh

Introduction

Zudakh (Zúdağ) was created / is being created for a worldbuilding project. Because of this, it was created to be somewhat naturalistic. The language is agglutinative and I tried to incorporate some inspiration from Finnish and Hungarian, like vowel harmony.

Zudakh is spoken primarily in the Republic of Dakhduk (Dağduk), and is part of the [placeholder a] language family, making it hypothesized that it was likely the language spoken when human first arrived on the island of Dakhduk (albeit in its ancient form). There is a theory that proto-[placeholder a] was at some point spoken by the entirety of the continent, although, it is debatable as to whether [placeholder a] could be considered to be part of [root family of everything idk] by the time [placeholder a] reached the island of modern day Dakhduk. Zudakh is most closely related to [placeholder b], being the two largest members of the [placeholder a] family, with the two being relatively mutually intelligible. Because of this, and the two countries' cultural and political proximity, both Zudakh and [placeholder b] are official languages of Dakhduk, while only [placeholder b] is an official language of [country b], with Zudakh being a recognized minority language. While [placeholder b] is rarely spoken natively in Zakhduk, there are small populations of Zudakh speakers in [country b]. This is shown by [country b] being the country with the highest number of Zudakh speakers, excluding Dakhduk. This is an effect of the occupation of Dakhduk, and is a controversial issue within Dakhdukian politics.

Being a [placeholder a] language, it is agglutinative, and has nominative-accusative alignment. It is nearly strictly head-initial, with a VSO word order, though only the verb is required to stay in its position. Only nouns inflect for case, and only verbs inflect for tense and mood.

Phonology

Consonants

Method of articulation	Bilabial	Dental	Palatal	Velar
Nasal	m	n
Plosive	p b	t d		k g
Fricative	ɸ β	s z	ç ʝ	ɣ
Affricates			cç ɟʝ
Approximant		ɹ	j

Vowels

	Front Unrounded	Front Rounded	Central	Back Unrounded	Back Rounded
Close	i iː	y yː		ɯ ɯː	u uː
Mid	ɛ ɛː				ɔ ɔː
Open			a aː