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.

It also has eighteen consonant phonemes, eleven of which can also be geminated, alongside significant allophony.

The consonant <ʀ> can also function as a syllable nucleus alongside the vowels.

Pronouns
Personal pronouns:

Interrogative pronouns - the singular paradigm is taken from *hwaz and the plural paradigm from *hwarjaz:

Verbs
Vag Islander verbs are divided into 4 weak and 7 strong verb classes, with some irregular verbs being unclassified. They conjugate for the present and past tenses, as well as the active and passive voices. They can be either indicative or subjunctive. The passive is formed by the co-passive form of the verb (f.e.  of ) and the active forms of the auxiliary .

Auxiliaries
Vag Islander auxiliaries are irregular verbs that are primarily used as copulas or in the formation of certain tenses, voices or other periphrastic items. The most frequent auxiliary verbs are  (PGmc *wesaną -- be; optative auxiliary; copula),  (PGmc *werþaną -- become; inchoative/passive auxiliary; inchoative copula),  (cf SSm  -- be able/can; future auxiliary),  (cf SSm  -- come, arrive; future auxiliary) and  (PGmc *skulaną -- future auxiliary).

All of these verbs, except <bēttą>, only have active forms and all of them are irregular in their inflection. <vasą>, <skolą> and <varða> furthermore have a suppletive conjugation.

The conjugation of <vasą>:

Weak Class I
Inherited from Proto-Germanic -ij- and -j- verbs, the first class of weak verbs has mostly causatives and denominatives that may have shifted semantically over time. Their infinitives end in -ją, from *-(i)janą. Example verb: <drekkją> (get drunk):

They are in general conjugated with the following suffixes:

Weak Class II
Inherited from Proto-Germanic -ō- verbs, it has verbs of various meanings, including duty-denominalisers. Their infinitives end in -ą, from *-ōną. Example verb: <baþōną> (wash, bathe):

They are conjugated with the suffixes: