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.