Gandan

Gandan is the official language of the Gandana people, and one of three major languages commonly spoken in Khalumaka. It is estimated there are over 850,000 native speakers of Gandan.

Classification and Dialects
There are currently two officially recognized dialects in Gandan: Traditional Gandan and Modern Gandan.

Consonants
1. the /r/ phoneme is realized as a single tap [ɾ] by most speakers.

2. [tθ] exists in free variation with [θ] as allophones of /th/. [tθ] tends to occur more often, though.

3. [th] was the original phone for the /th/ phoneme, and [θ] did not exist. The latter was later adopted into the language (along with a few others) as a result of influence from neighboring cultures and borrowing of words. Currently, in both Modern and Traditional Gandan, [th] now appears mostly as an allophone of the /t/ phoneme.

Vowels
/i/ and /o/ are pronounced [ɪ] and [o], respectively, after prenasalized consonants and when the vowel is word-initial. Inconsistently, they may also be pronounced as such on unstressed syllables. They are [i] and [ɔ] otherwise.

Phonotactics
Gandan syllables are canonically (N)C(w)V, and words must end with a vowel. Consonant clusters consist of any consonant, optionally preceded by a homorganic nasal consonant, and optionally followed by the consonant /w/. Vowel clusters are not possible, but stressed and accented syllables may be subject to lengthening.

Stress always falls on the first or second syllable of a word, and every other syllable after it. Three-syllable words are always stressed on the second syllable. Two-syllable words are always stressed on the first syllable.

Pitch-Accents
Gandan is a pitch-accent language. It uses a basic pattern of high and low tones, although some words are unaccented.

Writing System
Gandan is written using the standard Latin alphabet. However, the pronunciation of some of the letters is different than for English. Additional phonemes are written with multiple letters.

Grammar
Some primary features of Gandan:
 * word order is subject-verb-object