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Nidâri is one of two extant members of the Duaric language family. The language is spoken by roughly 1,200 people in Sašvân ("refuge"), a volcanic island approximately 1100 km southeast of Minhay. Unlike its relative, Ín Duári, more than 90% of its inhabitants claim Nidâri as their first language. The language's survival and relative health compared to Ín Duári, considered a moribund language, can be attributed to the physical separation of its speakers from the Minhast mainland. | Nidâri is one of two extant members of the Duaric language family. The language is spoken by roughly 1,200 people in Sašvân ("refuge"), a volcanic island approximately 1100 km southeast of Minhay. Unlike its relative, Ín Duári, more than 90% of its inhabitants claim Nidâri as their first language. The language's survival and relative health compared to Ín Duári, considered a moribund language, can be attributed to the physical separation of its speakers from the Minhast mainland. | ||
Because of this separation, various phonemic and morphological changes have rendered Nidâri and Ín Duári mutually unintelligible. While more innovations have occurred in Nidâri, it nevertheless has retained more of the original Duaric lexicon, as loanwords from the [[Minhast]] and Peshpeg languages have had a significant impact on the Ín Duári lexicon. | Because of this separation, various phonemic and morphological changes have rendered Nidâri and Ín Duári mutually unintelligible. Ín Duári is considered the more conservative of the two languages, as it has preserved most of the protolanguage's noun class system and more archaic verb system. While more innovations have indeed occurred in Nidâri, it nevertheless has retained more of the original Duaric lexicon, as loanwords from the [[Minhast]] and Peshpeg languages have had a significant impact on the Ín Duári lexicon. Moreover, while it is the case that the Nidâri noun class system has been reduced to four classes, as opposed to Ín Duári's eight classes, the number of irregularities' in Nidâri's noun class system paradoxically reveals that it has preserved remnants of an even more extensive system from the protolanguage. | ||
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