Petersburgian

Petersburgian is a descendant of the Modern Russian language, spoken in Saint Petersburg.

Classification and Dialects
Petersburgian evolved from a local accent of Russian. It has been influenced by neighbouring languages, including North Russian dialects, Estonian and Finnish. It is closely related and partly mutually intelligible with other descendants of Russian, including "Standard Russian" (the language spoken in Moscow).

Consonants
All consonants except for /w/ and /j/ can be geminated. /θ/ and /ð/ occur only in loanwords, mainly from English. /f/ as a separate phoneme also mostly occurs in loanwords, but [f] is a common allophone of /v/.

Vowels
There are six contrastive vowels, plus a marginal neutral sound [ə]. The realization of /ɨ/ varies from [ɨ] to [ɯ] to [ɘ] to [ɤ], depending on the speaker. /e/ is also often realized as [ɛ], especially when not followed or preceded by /j/.

Diphthongs
Petersburgian allows for some diphthongs natively and for many more as borrowings. The following is a table of natively occurring diphthongs. A few triphthongs are also allowed, such as /jaw/, /jow/, /jew/, /jaj/, /juj/, /jej/, /woj/, /wow/.

Writing System
Petersburgian uses its variant of the Cyrillic alphabet. When /tɕ, dʑ, ɕ, ʑ, ɲ/ are followed by a vowel, ь is not added at the end of the respective glyph, instead the vowel is turned into its iotized version. As in Russian, ь and ъ are used to indicate that the preceding consonant is palatal and non-palatal respectively, however it can only be applied to alveolar consonants due to the loss of paiatalized labials.

Grammar
While the grammar of Petersburgian has underwent a relative simplification compared to Russian, it still preserves many of its older features. One of the most notable changes is the loss of a distinct neuter gender, which has for the most part merged with the feminine. Auxiliary verbs have also taken a larger role in verb formation and indications of TAM.

Verbs
In the non-past tense, verbs inflect for person and number, while in the past tense they inflect for gender and number.

Auxiliary verbs
Petersburgian has inherited the use of the copula to indicate the future. Additionally, it uses the past tense of the copula as an auxiliary to indicate a plurperfect.