Gandan

Gandan is the official language of the Gandana people, and one of three major languages commonly spoken in southern Khalumaka. It is estimated there are over 6 million people who speak Gandan, with about 4.5 million native speakers.

Classification and Dialects
There are currently two officially recognized dialects in Gandan: Traditional Gandan and Modern Gandan. Traditional Gandan is the dialect spoken by the Gandana people, and the majority of native speakers. Modern Gandan is commonly spoken by urban populations, and is commonly used for translation purposes in media. There are also some minor dialects spoken throughout southern Khalumaka, most of which are mutually unintelligible from Traditional Gandan.

Consonants
/r/ is realized as either a short trill [r] or more commonly as a single tap [ɾ] by most speakers. /θ/ is the official phoneme represented by ⟨th⟩, but some dialects register it as /t̪θ/. For both the traditional and urban dialects, [t̪θ] is an allophone of /θ/, occurring in complementary distribution. A few dialects treat [th] as a separate phoneme (historically, it was a separate phoneme), but the two major dialects treat it as an allophone of /t/, occurring in free variation with [t]; in the urban dialect, this has extended to /ph/ and /kh/ as well, and ultimately, the aspiration distinction may be lost entirely, with the aspirated phonemes becoming allophones.
 * it is [t̪θ] word-initially, on stressed syllables, and when preceded by /u/.
 * it is [θ] otherwise.

Vowels
/i/ is almost always pronounced [i], but may be pronounced [ɪ] when the vowel appears word-initially. /o/ is typically between [o] and [ɔ], leaning towards [ɔ] for most speakers, although [o] does occur in the urban dialect.

Phonotactics
Gandan syllables are canonically (N)C(w)V, and words must end with a vowel. Consonant clusters consist of any consonant, optionally preceded by a homorganic nasal consonant, and optionally followed by the consonant /w/. Vowel clusters are not possible, but vowels may be lengthened as a result of tones.

Stress normally falls on the penultimate syllable of a word.

Tones
Gandan is a tonal language. It has three tonemes; high, low, and mid or "flat". Tones are not usually marked in writing, but they can be distinctive. For instance, the words for "spirit" and "ancestor" are both spelled umutho, but are pronounced with different tones: /ùmùthó/ for “spirit”, and /ùmúthò/ for “ancestor”.

While they are treated as a toneme, mid tones are better described as the absence of tone, a kind of default that may be overridden by other tones. Low tones behave similarly in this regard, however, low tones may override mid tones, so low tones are not truly an absence of tone. The word "toneless" may be used to describe words and stems that have only mid tones as their assigned word tone.

Tones may be marked in learning material using diacritics for grammar purposes (these will be used throughout this article to indicate aspects that the standard orthography fails to.) While rising and falling tones do exist, they are not marked, as they are the result of other tones interacting with each other, rather than being separate tonemes.
 * an acute accent á é í ó ú indicates a high tone.
 * a grave accent à è ì ò ù indicates a low tone.
 * no diacritic indicates a mid tone or where tone is not relevant.
 * a diaeresis below a consonant m̤ n̤ w̤ y̤ indicates they are depressors.

Depressor Consonants
There are depressor variants of consonants, which lower the onset of their syllable. This turns high tones into rising tones, and displaces the high tone to the right. On low tones, it blocks assimilation to a preceding high tone, and causes any following low tones to stay low.

Almost any consonant may be designated as a depressor, with only a few exceptions. For some speakers, when voiced consonants are depressors, they are either devoiced, or become breathy (this change is allophonic), a remnant from when the language had this distinction in its consonant inventory; this is most common among speakers of traditional Gandan.

Tone of Nouns
Every noun stem (without the prefix) has an inherent tone pattern, where every syllable is either high-toned (H), low-toned (L), or mid-toned (M). Some texts may label inherent mid-tones as low, but since mid tones behave differently in certain cases than low tones, it’s important the two are distinguished.

There are several rules which act to modify the underlying tone pattern to produce the tones heard in speech. Thus, the spoken tones may differ quite strikingly from the underlying tones.

The following rules apply to nouns:

1. Prefix spread: If the prefix is high toned, and the first syllable of the stem is mid toned, the high tone spreads rightward onto the stem (low tones assimilate to high tones, but are otherwise unchanged). For two syllable prefixes, the high tone spreads to the end of the prefix.

2. H-spread: If the last high tone of a word occurs before the antepenultimate syllable, the high tone spreads rightward onto the antepenultimate syllable. If the stem contains no high tones, this may apply to a high tone on the prefix as well, causing it to spread onto the stem.

3. Left Deletion: In a sequence of high tones on the stem as a result of the spreading rules, all but the last high tone are deleted and replaced with mid tones. Two-syllable stems are ignored unless the spreading rules result in HH on the stem, in which case all high tones on the stem are deleted, even if they are inherent, rather than the result of spreading.

4. Tone displacement: if a high tone falls on a syllable with a depressor, the high tone moves rightward onto the next syllable, and the syllable with the depressor becomes a rising tone. Displacement is blocked under following conditions: 5. ML-drop: in a sequence of a mid tone followed by a low tone, if the low tone is long, the mid tone becomes a low tone. This is blocked if the low tone is short, either due to the preceding mid tone being stressed, or the low tone is stressed but not lengthened.
 * When the syllable has a long vowel.
 * When the following syllable also has a depressor consonant.
 * When the following syllable is the final syllable, and is short.

6. Dissimilation: any remaining HH sequence becomes HL.

Writing System
Gandan is written using the standard Latin alphabet. However, the pronunciation of some of the letters is different than for English. Additional phonemes are written with multiple letters.

Noun Classes
Gandan groups nouns into classes, analogous to genders in other languages. However, like other languages of its family, these noun classes carry some semantic meaning in determining the meaning of the noun, and aren't just arbitrary like genders. The noun classes affect not only the nouns themselves, but also all their modifiers (adjectives, numbers demonstratives) and verbs.

It should be noted that the meanings for each class are general, and shouldn’t be taken as a rule. It should be noted that certain noun classes (specifically, classes 1, 2, 4, and 7) were originally two separate classes that got merged into one, hence the two sets of distinct prefixes for these noun classes. Loanwords take the prefixes for either class 7 or class 11.

For the plural forms of nouns, the prefix is either changed to a different one for the same class (classes 1, 2, 4, and 7 only), or a vowel/consonant is added to the prefix that matches that of the prefix itself.

Some example nouns:

píthezí “snowflake” -> ípithezi “snowflakes”

únoko “child” -> thunoko “children”

sajari “nomad” -> mjari “nomads”

eng’undu “cow” -> neng’undu “cows”

Pronouns
Personal pronouns in Gandan come in two forms; as independent words, and as a stem that is used in combination with words like sizi "with, to have". Note that sex/gender is not distinguished, and the 3rd person singular can mean either "he" or "she". However, these pronouns are restricted to animate nouns, so it generally does not mean "it". The genitive -pé does not have this restriction, and can mean either "his", "hers", or "its", depending on context.

Gandan is a pro-drop language. As the verb usually includes prefixes for the subject and object, the personal pronouns are not explicitly needed, and are mostly used for emphasis. Exceptions to this are when the pronoun is needed (e.g Amithi kwa "I am"), and when the verb form cannot take subject prefixes.

Articles
There are no articles in Gandan. A word such as hebokwu "book" can be taken to mean either "a book" or "the book" depending on context. When the distinction must be made, adjectives and demonstratives are used to impart this.

Demonstratives
Demonstratives in Gandan appear as standalone words, like pronouns. They always come after the noun.

There are four types of demonstratives:
 * Proximal - referring to something near the speaker. It is formed by suffixing the verbal concord with -lV, where V is the same vowel as the concord.
 * Medial - referring to something near the addressee. It is formed by suffixing the verbal concord with -wa.
 * Distal - referring to something far from both the speaker and addressee. It is formed by suffixing the verbal concord with -ye.
 * Referential - "aforementioned"; referring to something previously talked about. It is formed by taking the medial demonstrative and changing the final vowel to /o/.

Other Determiners
Gandan also has a set of distributive/quantitative determiners, in the form of -o "any", -oya "all", -be "which", and -ithi "self".

Tense
Morphologically, verbs in Gandan only have a present tense. Past and future tense are inflected using tones. Low-high or rising tone inflects future tense, and high-low, or falling tone inflects past tense. For present tense, the word is toneless.

The exception to this is relative clauses, in which case tense prefixes are used, and the verb stem is toneless. The inherent tone pattern of the stem may still be heard, but in principle, the verb is not assigned word tones in its relative form.

Subject and Object Concord
Both the subject and object of a sentence are indicated by prefixes or concords attached to the verb. When a noun is the subject or object, the concord must agree in gender.

There is a negative and positive form of the subject, but only a positive form of the object. It is formed by appending ki- to the concord.

The two forms of the concord for the noun classes are for the singular and plural forms of the nouns, respectively. Classes 1, 2, 4, and 7 generally depend on the noun to determine which concord is used for singular and plural, but in some dialects, and increasingly in Modern Gandan, the same concord is used for singular and plural, regardless of which form of the prefix the noun has. Additionally, for the third-person singular and plural (Class 1), singular is always tu-, and plural is always wú-.

Aspect and Mood
Gandan has a rich array of inflections for aspect and mood. Although the aspect inflections have largely disappeared with the absence of tense, they are still inflected through other means.

Below is a list of TAM forms in Gandan. Note that while the basic tenses past, present, and future have TAM forms in this chart, they are not used except in when their relative forms appear. Items in parenthesis indicates optional elements.

Imperative
The imperative is used to issue direct commands. It may appear alone or with an object prefix. The presence of an object prefix, including the reflexive mi-, causes the final vowel to mutate, as shown below. The suffix -vi is used when addressing multiple people.

/a/ -> /e/

/e/ -> /i/

/i/ -> /e/

/o/ -> /u/

/u/ -> /i/ There is no negative form of the imperative; the equivalent is achieved with the negative subjunctive. This is explained in more detail below, but for completeness, the negative equivalents of the above examples are given here.

Perfect
The perfect tense indicates an action or event that occurred in the past, with the focus being on its relevance to the present moment. For example, sanílipík̤a “I have cooked” describes a past event with present relevance (i.e the food is ready now), whereas sampík̤a “I cooked” describes a past action with no implication of any relevance to the present (the food may have been eaten long ago, or not.)

The perfect is formed in the positive with the prefix ili-. The negative is formed with the negative subject prefix plus -na(kh)-.