Alas alank

Diphthongs
There is only one diphthong in the Alasian language: /aɪ̯/.

Vowel sequences
Two vowels cannot follow on each other in Alasian - they always have to be separated by /j/.

Plosives
The phonology of Alasian is somewhat special because it restricts the use of some of the most common sounds in the world's languages: Plosives. The voiceless plosives /p/, /t/ and /k/ exist but they can only be found in very special phonological environments:
 * 1) They can only be the last sound of a word.
 * 2) They are always preceded by their "related" nasal consonant (/m/ before /p/, /n/ before /t/ and /ŋ/ before /k/) and no other consonant can be in the same cluster.
 * 3) Their preceding vowel is always short.

Palatal approximant /j/
The palatal approximant /j/ occurs in Alasian but the sound doesn't alter the meaning of words. It only appears in vowel-initial words to prevent the glottal plosive /ʔ/ or between two vowels.

Clusters
Consonant clusters can only appear in the coda of a syllable and one cluster can only contain two consonants. The following clusters (without the nasal-plosive-clusters) are possible:

Assimilation
All consonant clusters containing plosives are subject to assimilation. Whenever you add suffixes to words ending in plosives the plosives are dropped (because they aren't the last sound of the word anymore). In compensate for this loss, the preceding nasal vowels are changed in the following way:

Stress
The stress of Alasian is usually on the first syllable of a word. This only changes when the first syllable contains a short vowel and the second syllable contains a long vowel (not a diphthong!) - in this case, the stress shifts to the long vowel in the second syllable.

Orthography
Because all plosives are automatically pronounced with a nasal before them, the letters K, P and T can be written with or without an M or N before them - the pronunciation of both ways is the same and both possibilities are accepted in Alasian. However, the combination of nasal letter and plosive letter is more common (and in the case of the language's name, NK is mandatory!).

General information
In Alasian, nouns, pronouns, articles and adjectives can and have to be declined for ...