Søta

Søta is a casual project that I will be messing around with in the limited free time I have lately; it is not my intention for it to have a unique, complex, or innovative grammar, but instead for it to be essentially a guinea pig for any linguistic functions and systems that I'd like to try out. The end result will likely be a very shallow and simple grammar and phonology that will be easy to manipulate and learn. This lang is entirely for personal use and will maintain characteristics that appeal to me, though I am very eager for and open to any kind of feedback or ideas interested people might have for such an open-ended project; I will do my best to regularly check the Talk page.

Classification and Dialects
Søta is a dialect continuum named for the most widely spoken of the Søtic dialects (Sǿta áyns Kagje) as well as the common ancestor language of all the dialects, referred to here as Old Søta. Sǿta áyns Kagje (SK) has become the unofficial standard dialect, used by roughly 80% of speakers as their day to day language. Names of dialects are subject to addition/change.
 * Old Søta
 * Group 1
 * Sǿta áyns Kagje
 * søtic-subdialect 1
 * søtic-subdialect 2
 * Søtsa
 * dialect 1b
 * Group 2
 * Subgroup 2.1
 * dialect 2.1a
 * subdialect 2.1a.1
 * subdialect 2.1a.2
 * dialect 2.1b
 * Subgroup 2.2
 * dialect 2.2a
 * dialect 2.2b
 * dialect 2.2c
 * Group 3?

Consonants
-The cluster /hS/, where S is any sonorant is realized as [S̥] (that is, a voiceless articulation of the sonorant); *(/v/ is treated as a sonorant in most dialects, with /hv/ being realized as [f] in most dialects but as [ɸ] in SK).

Vowels
-Most vowels have long/short pairs that will be addressed further in the Orthography.

-/ɑ, ɑː/ is present in most dialects though with varying realizations: as the long counterpart of /a/ in the majority of dialects; as an allophone of /ɔ/ in some others.

-In those dialects wherein /ɑː/ is the realization of long /a/, /ɑː/ has an allophone [ɔ:] before the approximates /r, l, j/.

-/ə/ only occurs in SK as a word-terminal allophone of both /ɛ/ and /a/, though with the pervasiveness of SK as the standard social register in most Søta speaking regions, it is not uncommon to hear terminal /ə/ in colloquial dialectal speech.

Orthography
The orthography of Søta is reasonably regular; a significant amount of the pronunciation of words is conveyed by extra-graphemic spelling conventions, especially relative to vowels (eg. i is /i/ before a single consonant, but /ɪ/ before two (with some exceptions); í is always /iː/; unmarked i in a single syllable word followed by a single consonant will always be /ɪ/). Long vowels are marked by an acute accent; historically all short vowels had long counterparts, though in most modern dialects the long versions of /ɪ, ʊ, ɔ, ɛ/ have merged with /i, u, o ,e/ respectively.