Vāgøgjaskt

General information
Vāgøgjaskt (or in English, Vag Islander) is a classical Germanic language once spoken in and around the Norwegian fylke of Sogn og Fjordane. It gets its name from the isle of Vågsøy where the first manuscripts were discovered. Vag Islander shares many of the soundchanges that created it out of Proto-Germanic with Old Norse, but the two differ somewhat. It can geographically and etymologically be classified as Northern Germanic as it is remarkably similar to Old West Norse and somewhat less so to Old East Norse.

It is an inflecting language with traits similar to and complexity hovering around that of Old Norse. It distinguishes four cases in all forms and the vocative only marginally; it has a definiteness distinction on its nouns and adjectives, marked with special inflectional endings. Unlike the definite inflections found in Old Norse, the ones in Vag Islander are more fully merged with standard case endings.

Phonology
Vag Islander has eight vowel qualities unevenly spaced across the vowel space: four front, three back and one central vowel quality. It features nasality and vowel length as distinctive features.

Any stressed vowel can be either short or long and either oral or nasal; the two features can overlap. Long vowels are marked with a macron diacritic (a long [ɒ:] would be <ȫ>) while nasalisation is marked with an ogonek (so that a nasal [ũ] would be <ų>); only [ỹ] receives a tilde diacritic, so that a long nasal [ỹ:] would be written <ỹ̄> as the vowel already has a descender.

The language has only four diphthongs: /au ei ey øy/ ; all other vowel combinations result in a hiatus.

Vag Islander has productive umlaut: the nearly fully regular u-umlaut and the more irregular i-umlaut. Since, due to its diachronics, Vag Islander generally disallows unstressed vowels having any quality other than [a ã i ĩ u ũ], some umlauts may seem opaque and unexpected, with exceptions randomly strewn around.

The primary effect of u-umlaut is extremely limited: it changes /a a:/ to /ɒ ɒ:/. Secondarily, it changes /a/ to /u/ in unstressed positions. It is caused by most unstressed /u/ vowels.