Elenian

General information
The Elenian Language (Еленискі Мелоу - Elenisqui Melou) is a Slavic language primarily spoken in the province of Elenin.

Elenian is believed to descend from the South Slavic branch, or at least was heavily influenced by South Slavic languages. Today it is preserved in Elenin as its official primary language (with English and Greek as secondary languages).

Elenian has two dialects, the most predominant being Southern Elenian (commonly referred to as Standard Elenian), which is spoken by 76% of the population. Northern Elenian, also known as Ordevish (Ordavish spelling: Ordevice pronunciation: /ɐr'd͡ze:vit͡s/), is a minority dialect that uses a modified Latin alphabet, which has become the official method of romanizing the Elenian language.

Alphabet and Pronunciation
Elenian currently uses a Cyrillic-based alphabet consisting of 33 letters;

☨ Used before front vowels е, и, or і.

In the latin alphabet, the letter h is a dependent letter used for either distinguishing phonemes or indicating a nasalized consonant (either ѧ or ѫ).

Little Yus ѧ and Big Yus ѫ have remained in the cyrillic alphabet, making Elenian the only living language to still use the letters.

Likewise, Yat ѣ retains the traditional value of the near-open front unrounded vowel, /æ/ as in "tag" when stressed. In its unstressed form the vowel sounds more like an open mid-front vowel /ɛ/.

The vowel у has shifted from back vowel /u/ to central vowel /ʉ/ and eventually /y/. A reform introduced the digraph оу from Old Church Slavonic to represent /u/.

All iotated vowels have been eliminated since the reform after World War II, instead using Decimal I before a vowel. Decimal I has also been used to substitute the Short I (Й) in transliterations of other slavic names. For example, the Russian name Юрий could be rendered as ''Іуриі. ''

When unstressed the letter и represents a near-close near-front unrounded vowel /ɪ/ as in lint, but can sometimes constitute a close front unrounded vowel (/i/) in after a palatalized consonant. Short words of three letters or less tend to be exceptions of this rule, for example ни ("not") is pronounced /ni/ rather than /nɪ/

Phonotactics
In some words Elenian has retained letter combinations that have been eliminated in most Slavic languages.

Stress
Since the placement of stress and emphasis has an important effect on the meaning of words, it has been developed that a consonant to immediately follow a stressed syllable would be doubled, or otherwise if there are no consonants at the end of the stressed syllable, the vowel would be doubled. For example "тренно" means "train" whereas "треноо" means "tripled". The two are pronounced the same phonetically; the distinguishment between them is that the stress in the first word is on the first syllable and the stress in the second word is on the second syllable.

Romanization
For transliteration from Cyrillic script to Latin, Elenian uses a system based on Polish and Romance languages.

It is not as literal of a system as most slavic languages. Firstly because of the implementation of "hard" and "soft" consonants as inspired by Romance languages, whereas placement before a front vowel (e, i, y) changes the pronunciation of the letter c from /k/ to /t͡ʃ/ and g from /ɣ/ to /ʒ/. Moreover it borrows the tactic of using the digraphs qu and gu to make an exception to this rule.

Palatalization also has a few rules unique to Elenian; a soft sign (ь) can be rendered as an accent over whatever consonant follows. Word finally, the soft sign changes to e, to the effect of the silent e like in French or English. A grave accent is used to distinguish a palatalized final consonant from a final e. Examples:

Vocabulary
The language has a substantial amount of Greek borrowings, a lesser majority of them Turkish.

Loanwords from Greek
Neighboring Greek colonies have effected the Elenian culture and language. The following displays a short list of Greek words that have been adopted into common speech: