Sīli

General information
The Sīli language (or in English: Silian) is spoken by the Sīl people who live on an island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. The island and its people were only discovered by European sailors in the late 19th century.

Sīli is a highly inflected language that is not related to any language on the entire planet.

Monophthongs
Sīli possesses 6 vowels: 5 oral vowels and 1 nasal vowel. All oral vowels can be either short or long; the nasal vowel, however, is always long.

The vowel [ə] is sometimes added after words ending in a voiced consonant to make their pronunciation easier but Sīli people do not consider it a "true" vowel.

Diphthongs
All diphtongs of Sīli start with an existing monophthong and end in 1 of 3 non-existant monophthongs: [ɐ̯], [ɪ̯] or [ʊ̯].

The nasal vowel cannot form any diphthong.

The vowel [a] cannot form a diphthong with [ɐ̯]. All other oral vowels can form diphthongs with [ɐ̯] - the oral vowels can be short or long!

Only the vowels [a] and [o] can form diphthongs with [ɪ̯] and [ʊ̯] - the oral vowels are always short in these diphthongs!

Consonants
All Silian consonants are short. However, since consonant length doesn't matter, consonant length can sometimes be lengthened for various reasons, e. g. comedy, stress, anger (etc.).

Stress
The stress of a Silian word is usually on the penultimate syllable. However, if the penultimate contains a short vowel / dipthong and if the ultimate contains a long vowel / diphthong, the stress shifts over to the ultimate.

Phonotactics
Silian phonotactics are pretty "easy" - every syllable contains a vowel or diphthong (of some sort) in its nucleus and (optionally) one or more consonants in onset and coda.

The long nasal vowel can only appear in the end of words.

Consonant clusters can be basically any combination of consonants - the only rule is that clusters can contain either only voiced plosives, fricatives and affricates or only voiceless plosives fricatives and affricates.

Alphabet
Sīli doesn't use any capital letters - everything is written lower case letters.

Long vowels are written as the corresponding short vowel letter + a makron (¯).

Diphthongs are written with a, i and u representing [ɐ̯], [ɪ̯] and [ʊ̯].