Tameï

Tameï
намұш Тамеи
Pronunciation	[[ˈnɑmuɕ tɑmeˈi]]
Created by	Lili21
Date	Dec 2017
Setting	alt-Earth
Ethnicity	Tameï
Native speakers	42,000,000 (2017)
Language family	Isolate Tameï
Official status
Regulated by	Central National Committee of the Tameïan Language (комитеты главны ланньешыръ намұшыр Тамеи - КГЛНТ)

Tameï (Тамеи [tɑmeˈi] or намұш Тамеи [ˈnɑmuɕ tɑmeˈi]) is a language isolate spoken in the Tameï Islands (хямша Тамеи [ˈxjæmɕæ tɑmeˈi]), an independent volcanic archipelago country in the Indian Ocean, along the Ninety East Ridge, about 1000 km WSW of Sumatra and roughly halfway between Sri Lanka and the Australian territory of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.

Tameï is Earth's second most spoken language isolate (after Korean), being the native tongue of about 42 million people, mostly in the Tameï Islands but also in countries of the former USSR. Tameï is one of two official languages in the country - the Tameïan People's Socialist Republic (officially Репұбылихы Социалистически Ланньыр Тамеи and Социалистическая Республика Тамеиского Народа) as Russian is still official for historical and cultural reasons, despite actual Russian native speakers being only 1% of the Tameï population.

Despite fairly regular contacts with the peoples of Indonesia through centuries, the first major external influence in the Tameï Islands came with the first Western contact in 1559 through a French expedition by Bénoit de Neuilly on the ship L'Orléanaise. Established in 1602 as a French colony, the Tameï islands remained under French rule until 1814, when they were conquered by the British. They remained a British colony until the Communist Revolution of 1934 which saw the Tameï Islands, extremely rich in raw materials, become an important partner of the USSR, a role fulfilled until the dawn of the 21st century, with multi-party elections first being allowed in 1999. Self-defined Tameï people (even if heavily intermixed with other groups) are the majority, forming 57% of the population; there are also substantial Pashtun (21%) and Punjabi (13%) components. Religiously, there is no absolute majority; the largest religion is Sufi Islam, followed by 30% of the population, with atheism or irreligiousness (28%) and more or less syncretic modern forms of Tameï shamanism (24%) also being relevant percentages.

This history, and the varied ethnic composition of the Tameï state (which saw a large influx of West and South Asians during the British period, as well as European communists during the 20th century), are reflected in its language, which has up to 20% of its lexicon of foreign origin, with early loans from French (borrowed early enough to have underwent Tameï vowel shifts), then from English, Persian, Pashto (the latter two especially in more colloquial registers), and more recently from Russian and Japanese (the latter because of heavy Japanese cultural influence since the end of the Communist era). Tameï's orthography was only created after the Revolution of 1934. The first orthography was based on French spelling conventions, though the difficult way of representing some sounds specific to Tameï led to different proposals being considered. Finally, in 1943, the current Cyrillic orthography was introduced, requested by the government as a sign of political alignment with the Soviet Union; the orthography itself was heavily influenced by the Cyrillic alphabet for Kazakh that at the time had just been introduced. In contemporary Tameï, some words (mostly Russian proper names) keep the original spelling but pronounced as a Tameï word, like the city of Сталинахаль, is [ˈtʲælʲinæˌχɑj].

Tameï is a mostly agglutinating language, with complex inflected verbs but light nominal morphology (mostly consisting of highly irregular pluralization patterns). On the phonetic side, it has a system of vowel harmony which deeply characterizes the language and is also extended to loanwords: Tameï has, therefore, a complex vowel inventory with 10 monophthongs and at least 18 or 19 diphthongs. Together with Damin, Tameï is one of only two non-African languages using click consonants.

(TBC)