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[[Nithish/Music]]

Nithish (''niđiske ṛstine'', from the word ''niđja'' "one's own") is an Indo-European language in the Nithic branch, a satem branch in a clade with [[Azalic]]. It's spoken in a parallel-Earth Ukraine, Belarus, and Korea, and is influenced by Uralic languages. It's also spoken in the island of Nōje Ceme (Isle of Man in our timeline), and substantial Nithish-speaking communities exist in parts of parallel-earth Russia, Alaska and Tibet. More recently it has absorbed words and calques from various Mediterranean languages.

Nithish has many accents and there is even a creole of Nithish, Korean and a little Nivkh, ''Bamaej-eo'' (literally "mixed language"), with some Korean words and mostly Korean syntax. Bamaej-eo, spoken in parallel Earth Sakhalin, is notable for being the only modern Nithic language which preserves the stop system of Middle Nithish, reinforced by Korean's stop system. Another notable creole is Nithlish, spoken by Nithish people in Anglophone parts of [[Verse:Apple PIE]]. It has Nithish syntax but generally less free word order, influenced by English, and a general reduction in morphology (there is no grammatical case in Nithlish, as in Bulgarian). Nithlish has some peculiar grammatical quirks found in neither Nithish nor English, such as the total avoidance of infinitive forms (believed to be borrowed from Arabic), and a total syncretism of the dative and the genitive, using the apostrophe -'s for both. Some features borrowed from English are besides the more rigid word order, the presence of analytic tenses and a perfect tense construction with the verb ''emi'' "to have" (''aiđi'' in standard Nithish; personal forms use the root ''em-'').

Modern Nithish is notable for mostly preserving PIE's syllabic approximants, ḷ and ṛ. However, Nithish consonants display various innovations including Grimm's law taken a step further (as in Dutch in our timeline).

Nithish has three noun genders, termed animate, inanimate and collective by native grammarians. These correspond to masculine, neuter and feminine genders in other Indo-European languages. The correlation between grammatical gender and biological gender is much less in Nithish than in other IE languages, due to the influence of Uralic languages.

As in Latin and Greek, Nithish has various declension paradigms for nouns. Some common ones are:

Gender has been almost completely regularized in Nithish, again due to Uralic influence -- it is correlated with morphology, so all nouns ending in ''-e'' are collective, even nouns like ''aste'' (bone), which derives from the Old Nithish neuter noun ''haste''. Most notably, Nithish pronouns do not inflect for gender, as in Armenian and Persian, but adjectives do; adjective genders follow lexical animacy when the noun is second or third declension and they follow nominal morphology for first declension nouns. There is also a distinction between attributive and predicative adjectives, with predicative adjectives never taking suffixes:

While Nithish doesn't have definite articles, Nithish adjectives inflect for definiteness. There are generally two forms for adjectives, the indefinite form and the definite form formed by postposing a clitic -za, -ze or -đa. The rules are as follows:

Verbs in Nithish do not inflect for aspect but there are lexical aspects, formed from prefixes (analogous to phrasal verbs in English), root extensions and sometimes suppletion. There are three tenses in Nithish: nonpast, direct past and inferential past, the latter deriving from an Old Nithish pluperfect tense.

Syntax in Nithish is quite free.