Gandan

Gandan is the official language of the Gandana people, and one of three major languages commonly spoken in southern Khalumaka. It is estimated there are over 6 million people who speak Gandan, with about 4.5 million native speakers.

Classification and Dialects
There are currently two officially recognized dialects in Gandan: Traditional Gandan and Modern Gandan. Traditional Gandan is the dialect spoken by the Gandana people, and the majority of native speakers. Modern Gandan is commonly spoken by urban populations, and is commonly used for translation purposes in media. There are also some minor dialects spoken throughout southern Khalumaka, most of which are mutually unintelligible from Traditional 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] is the more common pronunciation, especially in Traditional Gandan.

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] exists as an allophone of the /t/ phoneme. This explains why the /th/ phoneme is commonly pronounced as an affricate, and not a fricative.

Vowels
The phonemes /i/ and /o/ are pronounced [ɪ] and [o], respectively, when the vowel is word-initial, and sometimes on unstressed syllables (there are no rules governing the latter). They are [i] and [ɔ] otherwise. The long vowels are only used for tones.

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 vowels may be lengthened as a result of tones.

Stress normally falls on the penultimate syllable of a word.

Tones
Gandan is a tonal language. It has three tonemes; high, low, and mid or "flat". Tones are not usually marked in writing, but they can be distinctive. For instance, the words for "spirit" and "ancestor" are both spelled umutho, but are pronounced with different tones: /ùmùthó/ for “spirit”, and /ùmúthò/ for “ancestor”.

There are depressor variants of consonants, which lower the onset of their syllable. This turns high tones into rising tones, and displaces the high tone to the right. On low tones, it blocks assimilation to a following high tone, and causes a preceding high tone to become a falling tone, dropping in pitch near the end. Mid tones are similar to low tones in this regard, although a slight rise in tone may be perceived at the end of the syllable.

In all instances of depressor consonants, the vowels affected by its presence become long, although the degree to which they are lengthened in speech varies from speaker to speaker. These are the only marked long vowels; other vowels in various circumstances may be lengthened, but they are not considered "long".

Although Gandan does not mark tones in writing, they may be indicated in learning material using diacritics for grammar purposes (these will be used in the grammar section below.)
 * an acute accent á é í ó ú indicates a high tone.
 * a grave accent à è ì ò ù indicates a low tone.
 * no diacritic indicates a mid tone or that the vowel is toneless.
 * a diaeresis below a consonant m̤ n̤ w̤ y̤ indicates they are depressors.

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.

Noun Classes
Gandan groups nouns into classes, analogous to genders in other languages. However, like other languages of its family, these noun classes carry some semantic meaning in determining the meaning of the noun, and aren't just arbitrary like genders. The noun classes affect not only the nouns themselves, but also all their modifiers (adjectives, numbers demonstratives) and verbs.

Pronouns
Personal pronouns in Gandan come in two forms; as independent words, and as a stem that is used in combination with words like sizi "with, to have". Note that sex/gender is not distinguished, and the 3rd person singular can mean either "he" or "she". However, these pronouns are restricted to animate nouns, so it generally does not mean "it". The genitive -sazi does not have this restriction, and can mean either "his", "hers", or "its", depending on context.

Gandan is a pro-drop language. As the verb usually includes prefixes for the subject and object, the personal pronouns are not explicitly needed, and are mostly used for emphasis. Exceptions to this are when the pronoun is needed (e.g Amithi kwa "I am"), and when the verb form cannot take subject prefixes.

Articles
There are no articles in Gandan. A word such as hebokwu "book" can be taken to mean either "a book" or "the book" depending on context. When the distinction must be made, adjectives and demonstratives are used to impart this.

Demonstratives
Demonstratives in Gandan appear as standalone words, like pronouns. They always come after the noun they modify.

There are four types of demonstratives:
 * Proximal - referring to something near the speaker. It is formed by suffixing the verbal concord with -lV, where V is the same vowel as the concord.
 * Medial - referring to something near the addressee. It is formed by suffixing the verbal concord with -wa.
 * Distal - referring to something far from both the speaker and addressee. It is formed by suffixing the verbal concord with -ye.
 * Referential - "aforementioned"; referring to something previously talked about. It is formed by suffixing the verbal concord with -sha.

Other Determiners
Gandan also has a set of distributive/quantitative determiners, in the form of -o "any", -oya "all", -be "which", and -ithi "self".

Tense
Morphologically, verbs in Gandan only have a present tense. Past and future tense are inflected using tones. Low-high or rising tone inflects future tense, and high-low, or falling tone inflects past tense. For present tense, the word is toneless.

The exception to this is relative clauses, in which case tense prefixes are used, and the verb stem is toneless.

Subject and Object Concord
Both the subject and object of a sentence are indicated by prefixes or concords attached to the verb. When a noun is the subject or object, the concord must agree in gender.

There is a negative and positive form of the subject, but only a positive form of the object. It is formed by appending the negative prefix na(kh)- to the concord, with a few exceptions (class 5 unwa-, class 8 pina-, class 4 nda-).

Aspect and Mood
Gandan has a rich array of inflections for aspect and mood. Although the aspect inflections have largely disappeared with the absence of tense, they are still inflected through other means.

Below is a list of TAM forms in Gandan. Note that while the basic tenses past, present, and future have TAM forms in this chart, they are not used except in when their relative forms appear. Items in parenthesis indicates optional elements.

Imperative
The imperative is used to issue direct commands. It may appear alone or with an object prefix, and may be formed with just the verb alone, or with the addition of the suffix -bu. The suffix is most often used for emphasis, effectively having the same meaning as the English phrase “Just do what I say!”. The presence of an object prefix, including the reflexive mi-, causes the final vowel before the suffix to mutate, and the suffix is dropped. The sole exception is /i/; the vowel does not change, and instead, the suffix is prenasalized.

/a/ -> /e/

/e/ -> /i/

/i/ -> ø (/bu/ -> /mbu/)

/o/ -> /u/

/u/ -> /i/ There is no negative form of the imperative; the equivalent is achieved with the negative subjunctive. This is explained in more detail below, but for completeness, the negative equivalents of the above examples are given here.

Perfect
The perfect tense indicates an action or event that occurred in the past, with the focus being on its relevance to the present moment. For example, saníliphík̤a “I have cooked” describes a past event with present relevance (i.e the food is ready now), whereas samphík̤a “I cooked” describes a past action with no implication of any relevance to the present (the food may have been eaten long ago, or not.)

A more recent usage of the perfect tense is to indicate whether an event occurred in the recent past, or in the far past, something that grammatical tones do not convey. This is only in Modern Gandan, and is not (as of yet) an officially recognized part of the language.