Aspenish

Aspenish (Aspenush; /'a:s.pɛ.ɲʊʃ/) is the native language of the Aspenish people and the official language of the Republic of Aspenia, an island nation in northern Europe, and one of languages of the Nordic Council.

General information
Aspenish is classified as a North Germanic language, but it has been significantly incluenced by West Germanic and Insular Celtic and slightly influenced by Romance languages, especially French through English and Dutch.

Dialects
There are six main dialects spoken in Aspenia. They are The formation of dialects is due to the influence of different languages in specific zones. Dialects typically differ in terms of inflectional morphology, vocabulary, and particle usage.
 * Apple dialect (dukhyu pangyen; //)
 * Ash dialect (本島方言; //),
 * Cherry dialect (jakang pangyen; //),
 * Cedar dialect (dukhyu pangyen; //),
 * Pear dialect (dukhyu pangyen; //) and
 * Pine dialect (jakang pangyen; //).

Regulation
The regulatory authority for the teaching of Aspenish is the National Academy of the Aspenish Language (xxx; /pɔn.tɔ.paŋ.jɛn/) and carer body of the literary heritage in Aspenish is the National Institute of the Aspenish Literature (xxx; /pɔn.tɔ.paŋ.jɛn/). Both are especial bodies of the Aspenish Ministry of Culture, Education and Science (xxx; /pɔn.tɔ.paŋ.jɛn/).

Phonology
Aspenish has 33 consonant phonemes including allophones and 20 vowel phonemes, 10 long and 10 short. One of the most notorious charactaristics of Aspenish is the lack of affricates.

Consonants
The inventory of consonants in Aspendush is is similar to Germanic and Celtic languages. It has no clicks, ejectives nor implosives. The consonants are: 1/ɱ/ is the allophone of /m/ before labiodentals. 2/ŋ/ is the allophone of /n/ before velar plosives and fricatives. 3/r/ is the allophone of /ɾ/ at the beginning and the end of words.

4/ɦ/ is the allophone of /h/ voiced consonants.

Vowels
The inventory of vowels was anciently similar to the other North Germanic languages, but it was modified due to the influence of other Germanic and Celtic languages. Each of the 10 long vowels is phonetically paired with one of the 10 short vowels. The 20 vowels are:

Alphabet
The Aspenish alphabet uses a modified version of the Latin script:

Aa Ää Bb Dd Ee Ëë Ff Gg Hh Ii Ïï Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Öö Pp Rr Ss Tt Uu Üü Vv Ww Zz

Cc, Qq and Xx only appear in foreing words, especially names. Yy also appears in foreing words and after alveolar consonants to form their palatal counterpart. For example, ty and dy are pronounced /c/ and /ɟ/ respectively, and so on. The letter 'h' is written after vowels to lengthen them.

Phonotactics
The standard syllable structure is; Where (A) is a liquid consonant or a semivowel. There is consonant harmony according to the place of articulation when a syllable ends with a nasal or a liquid consonant (except fricatives and affricates) and the next syllable begins with a plosive or a fricative.

Grammar
Aspenish is a nominative–accusative language, morphologically agglutinative, flexive and uses several particles to determine the grammatical functions of the sentence elements.

World order
The basic word order in Aspendish is SVO in main clauses, SOV in relative clauses and VSO in questions and commands. However, as words are heavily inflected, the word order is fairly flexible and every combination may occur in poetry, i.e. SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV and OVS are all allowed for metrical purposes.

Cases, gender and number
Aspenish articles, nouns and adjectives inflect according to some or every of the following cases:
 * Nominative, nominatihf or XXX, marks the subject of a verb. Also marks the predicative case, used after the copulative verb vëzan "to be".
 * Accusative, akuzatihf or XXX, marks the direct object of a transitive verb and the object of a preposition.
 * Dative, datihf or XXX, marks the indirect object of a verb and movement to a place.
 * Genitive, genitihf or XXX, marks possession and movement from a place.

It's important to say that the dative and genitive cases are not used in directions.

Words also vary in three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Inanimate nouns are arbitrarily distributed in these three genders; the animate, however, are declined in the masculine or feminine according to sex and neuter is used when the speaker doesn't know the gender of the being or if it's ambiguous, like the case of plants, some of which hermaphrodite.

Finally, wrords are divided in countable and uncountable nouns.The countable nouns vary in number, but following the singulative-collective-plurative scheme. This is part of the Celtic heritage. In their default form, words are considered collective and one must add suffix to form the singulative the plurative.

Articles
One shared property with Germanic languages is the definiteness, which, in Aspenish, is marked by articles. However, unlike other North Germanic languages​​, Aspenish put all articles before nouns.The articles are devided in definite and indefinite.

The definite article declines in case, gender and number. The indefinite article declines in case and gender in the singulative number.

Nouns
Unlike articles, nouns only inflect in the plurative dative and all the singulative and plurative genitive.