Ukwetch

Ukwetch (known to its speakers as Túpanyar Okwunyasían, The Language of the Tribe) is a conlang made for the world Atheltar. It is one of the many branches of Farrayni, spoken prominently around the Great Bay area and to the south. It is mutually intelligable with Lakespeech from years of sustained trade, though has notable phonological differences.

A prior version of this language can be viewed at Wquetch.

Classification and Dialects
Ukwetch is a highly synthetic language with occasional analytic components. It is a member of the Farrayni family of languages, which have for the past 500 years been all but cut off from the rest of the world. This document describes the most common form spoken by the Quani and Swsquen tribes around 327 AY, who are most familiar to the northeast part of the continent. Without written records, the precise history is lost, though its closest visible relatives are Ukonose to the south and Wequane to the west.

Vowels
Wquetch vowels are distinguished by both length and tone. The tones are high ( ́) and low ( ̀). (TBD in further detail)

Phonotactics
Syllables are of the structure (C)(Approx)V(C)

Noun Classes
Ukwetch nouns decline according to 5 classes in an animacy hierarchy:

Even among some of the distinctions are further hierarchies; especially with animal-originated materials, there are a wide number of classes the same word might fall into depending on context. A person's heart or arm would always be C2, but a bird heart would be C3, and hair, though a body part, would be C5.

Each class has a different pronoun associated with it. Special 1st and 2nd person forms exist for speakers in C2, but non-C2 entities, if speaking or spoken to in a 1st or 2nd person context, are expected to still use their class-associated pronoun. The same is true for subject-verb agreement. Along that token, these pronomal forms are often dropped in a subject context, as in the past tense they are fully redundant with agreement. The pronouns are as follows:

Declensions
There are two different forms of alignment depending on the tense: Active/Stative in the present and future tenses, and Ergative/Absolutive in the past tense. The cases of Wquetch, listed by class, are as follows: The definite article is given as -r for C1-2 and -n for C3-5, preceding other markings.