South Vimnic

South Vimnic (Vgha) is spoken on the southeast coast of the Mainland and throughout the Southern Mountains. It has had extensive and artificial reconstruction and simplification from its archaic predecessor and is the official language of several small nations.

History
The southeast coast of the Mainland and the Southern Mountains were previously invaded and colonised twice by the Tev Empire, during which Old South Vimnic became extinct and much of the language became permanently lost. Once the region regained independence, the linguistic composition of the region was mainly Tev with various Tev creoles and pidgins. The nations of this region formed a multinational government and founded an institution to revive and purify Old South Vimnic through reconstruction based on Old South Vimnic (through old texts), other Vimnic languages, and regional creoles. This effort also utilised compounding, abbreviation, abstraction, and the elimination of most non-Vimnic lexical and grammatical influences—most notably excepting the agglutinative morphology (which occurred in most Tev creoles through Old South Vimnic's isolativity and Tev's fusionality). Various grammatical rules were also simplified, with grammatical exceptions generally being eliminated. The extensive initiative to educate the population in modern South Vimnic was aided by a newly-formed religious institution.

This initiative was well-received both internally and externally and achieved great success. However, this effort gradually slowed and halted due to a plague whose aftermath led to civil war and an invasion by Aurwe. During this time, radical compounding via South Vimnic's large amount of particles with varied lexical, phonological, and grammatical influences from the Aurwean language altered the language and led to a linguistic rift primarily between rural and urban areas. While connections between the cities improved causing the formation of the modern standard dialect, more isolated parts of the country became more isolated from the language and experienced stagnation and/or independent change. After this chaotic period, the governments of the region attempted a new linguistic purist movement which was poorly received in general and was soon discontinued despite some early success.

Classification
South Vimnic is a Vimnic language, but one of the least related languages in this family as it has been heavily constructed. South Vimnic is the indirect descendant of Old South Vimnic as it was mainly constructed from texts in Old South Vimnic, but it features significant amounts of reconstructions based on other Vimnic languages and Southern Mountains Tev Creole as well as borrowings and abstractions. Unlike most Vimnic languages—which are generally isolative—South Vimnic is agglutinative. But like most Vimnic languages, South Vimnic has a fairly flexible VSO-VOS word order, a large range of freely movable particles, no adjectives, and an active-stative morphosyntactic alignment.

Dialects
Modern South Vimnic has numerous dialects:
 * Standard dialect: The dialect generally considered to be standard as it is spoken in all of the major cities and by approximately 68% of the population. It could potentially be split into slightly deviating regional dialects.

Phonotactics
There are no vowel diphthongs in South Vimnic. When a vowel precedes another vowel due to morphemes or foreign origin, ʔ is inserted between them, including between words (see Syntax). Regular vowels also become nasalised before nasal consonants except for l, r, and ŕ (see Writing system).

There is also consonant harmony—mostly defined by voicing in bilabial to velar plosives, affricates, and fricatives—which prevents "voiced" consonants from being in a word with "unvoiced" consonants and vice versa. In South Vimnic, the "voice" harmony rules can be unintuitive. For example, while both r and ŕ represent voiced consonants, they are considered "unvoiced" and share the "voiced" form ṙ. If ṙ becomes "devoiced" however, it can only become r. When an "unvoiced" particle is appended a "voiced" stem, the consonants in that particle assume their "voiced" form and vice versa. There are also "neutral" consonants which do not affect a word's "voice". If a word consists of only neutral consonants, the "first-appended particle" rule applies to determine "voice" (see Syntax). The "voiced" consonants and their counterparts are detailed below with the neutral consonants.

South Vimnic is a consonant-heavy language with a syllable structure of (C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)—it can have consonant clusters with up to seven (7) consonants. However, no roots occur with the theoretical maximum of fourteen (14) consonants per vowel and there are only nine roots with a seven-consonant cluster (see Lexicon):
 * ajtfsxwʔ
 * ḋjdźǵwʔạ̈ńǵ
 * jdźbǵwʔeld
 * jǝjtśxwpʔ
 * jpśxṫwʔapwʔ
 * jvwdzǵʔẹ̈ḿ
 * ńjqśxwʔǝ̣
 * rjtsxwʔı̣tśxw
 * ṙjqźǵwʔọḋd

Romanised system
(*) Tone.
 * Regular vowels become nasalised before nasal consonants.
 * The letters l, r, and ŕ are pronounced as /n/, /ɱ/, and /ŋ/ respectively before other consonants and at the end of words. This occurrence never triggers nasalisation in preceding vowels.

Syntax
VSO/VOS word order

Lexicon

 * ajtfsxwʔ:
 * v. (tone I) perservere
 * v. (tone II) (literary) survive, outlast; (derogatory slang) elect; (dialectal) hold status, govern, get killed
 * n. (tone II) (slang or dialectal, derogatory) appointed official
 * ḋjdźǵwʔạ̈ńǵ:
 * n. (tone I) warbler
 * n. (tone II) wren; (dialectal) robin
 * n. (tone III) cotton plant; (dialectal) cat, small bird, bulrush
 * jdźbǵwʔeld:
 * n. (tone I) alder
 * n. (tone II) willow
 * v. (tone III) droop, sag
 * jǝjtśxwpʔ:
 * n. (tone I) rain
 * n. (tone II) dew
 * n. (tone III) juice; (vulgar slang) semen; (dialectal) blood, sweat, anger, jealousy
 * v. (tone III) (dialectal) ring out, sqeeze, anger
 * jpśxṫwʔapwʔ:
 * n. (tone I) (literary) spirit, soul
 * v. (tone I) (slang or dialectal) entrance; (dialectal) die, euthanise
 * n. (tone II) (literary) ghost
 * v. (tone II) (dialectal) die, haunt, frighten, starve
 * n. (tone III) (literary) demon; (dialectal) corpse, evil, evil person
 * v. (tone III) (slang or dialectal) murder
 * jvwdzǵʔẹ̈ḿ:
 * v. (tone I) tap (furnish with taps)
 * v. (tone II) extract (a resource); (dialectal) suckle
 * v. (tone III) (colloquial) extract (a resource); (dialectal) block
 * ńjqśxwʔǝ̣:
 * v. (tone I) dry, solidify
 * n. (tone II) ice
 * v. (tone II) (dialectal) freeze
 * v. (tone III) (colloquial) suffocate
 * rjtsxwʔı̣tśxw:
 * v. (tone I) compress
 * v. (tone II) bind, restrain, command
 * v. (tone III) stupidify
 * ṙjqźǵwʔọḋd:
 * n. (tone I) blonde hair; (slang or dialectal) jaundice, bleach
 * v. (tone I) (dialectal) age
 * n. (tone II) yellow; (dialectal) canary, coat of arms, bathrobe, footwrap, jaundice
 * v. (tone III) fade

Basic sentences

 * e˧˩npśo˧x le˧ʔạ˧ḿqa˧ e˧nqa˧la˧ʔ qʔǝ˧sı˧ṫxä˧˥ḣa˧?
 * Translation: Why are you going home?
 * IPA (standard pronunciation): /ˈɛ̃ː˧˩n.p͡ʂo˧x lɛ˧ˈʔãː˧.ɱqa˧ ɛ̃˧nˈqaː˧.laʔ qˀə˧.sɨ˧ˈθ͡xæː˧˥ħa˧/