Ŕønnåsk

Consonants
1 The rhotic consonants may either be trills [r̝ r] or taps [ɾ̞ ɾ], depending on the speaker. May also be syllabic in clusters of two or more consonants i.e. /mejr/

2 May also be realised as the plain lateral approximant /l/ in many dialects.

Pitch Accent
Ŕønnåsk is a pitch-accent language with two distinct pitch patterns, like Swedish and Norwegian. They are used to differentiate two-syllable words with otherwise identical pronunciations. For example, the word balen ('the ball [danse event') is pronounced using the simpler tone 1, while balen ('the nest') uses the more complex tone 2. Though spelling differences can differentiate written words, minimal pairs are often written alike, since written Ŕønnåsk has no explicit accent marks. Accent 1 uses a low flat pitch in the first syllable, while accent 2 uses a high, sharply falling pitch in the first syllable and a low pitch in the beginning of the second syllable. In both accents, these pitch movements are followed by a rise of intonational nature (phrase accent) — the size (and presence) of which signals emphasis or focus. That rise culminates in the final syllable of an accentual phrase, while the utterance-final fall common in most languages is either very small or absent.

The pitch accents give the Ŕønnåsk language a "singing" quality that makes it easy to distinguish from other languages.

Grammar
Ŕønnåsk is an inflected language with four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Ŕønnåsk can have one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in four cases and two numbers, singular and plural.

Morphology
Ŕønnåsk morphology is typical of other Germanic/Indo-European languages. Nouns are declined for case, number, definiteness and gender; adjectives for case, number, gender and definiteness with weak and strong inflections.

Ŕønnåsk possesses definite and indefinite articles. The definite article is usually a suffix added to the noun, however, definite inflection of adjectives plus den, dea, det can also be used. Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. There are two voices: active and passive. There are only two simple tenses, past and present, along with a number of auxiliary constructions, some of which may be regarded as tenses, others as aspects.

Nouns
Ŕønnåsk nouns are declined in four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. They belong to three main noun classes (masculine, feminine, neuter) and can be inflected for number (singular, plural) and definiteness (definite, indefinite). The following table shows four examples of strong declension. The gender of a noun can often be deduced by looking at the ending of the word:


 * Masculine nouns — often end in -ur, -i, -nn -het.
 * Feminine nouns — often end in -a, -ing.
 * Neuter nouns — usually have no ending or have a final accented vowel.

Articles
Ŕønnåsk has both indefinite articles (a/an in English), and definite articles (the in English) and is usually joined to the end of the word. The table below shows the different suffix forms for the three genders in the nominative. There are, however, some exceptions in every case. The examples below show three nouns, one for each respective gender, declined in the nominative:


 * masculine: en pojkur— "a boy" becomes pojkuren—"the boy"
 * feminine: ea jenta— "a girl" becomes jentan—"the girl"
 * neuter: et barn — "a child" becomes barnet—"the child"

Personal
The personal pronouns in Ŕønnåsk are as follows:

Ŕønnåsk possesses a reflexive pronoun, functioning in much the same way as German sich. The nominative case does not exist. For example,


 * hann þvættar sejr — he washes himself,

as opposed to being bathed by another,


 * hun klæðir sej — she dresses herself,

as opposed to being dressed. The pronoun does not distinguish gender or number.

Possessive
Modern Ŕønnåsk has only possessive pronouns for the first- and second-person singular and plural as well as the third-person reflexive. They are as follows, where the three columns for each person represent masculine, feminine and neuter genders respectively: Minn means mine, dinn means (singular) yours and sinn (which is a reflexive possessive pronoun) means his, her, its or theirs.

If one is to indicate possession for a person and number not amongst these pronouns (e.g. non-reflexive his, hers, its and theirs) the genitive of the corresponding (same person and number) personal pronoun is used.