South Vimnic

South Vimnic (Vgha) is spoken on the southeast coast of the Mainland and throughout the Southern Mountains. It can be considered a constructed language due to its extensive and artificial reconstruction and simplification from its archaic predecessor. It is the official language of several small nations.

History
In the past, the peoples of this region were invaded twice by the Tev who then colonised the region. Between these two attempts at colonisation, Old South Vimnic became extinct and much of the native language became permanently lost. After the region regained independence, the language of the region was splintered among the various dialects of Southern Mountains Tev Creole. The newly-formed governments in the region agreed to create a revived, purist form of Old South Vimnic with most non-Vimnic influences eliminated, notably excepting the agglutinative morphology (Old South Vimnic was isolating, whereas Tev is fusional; most dialects of Southern Mountains Tev Creole are agglutinative). Modern South Vimnic was created using the few remaining texts in Old South Vimnic, compounding, abbreviation, reconstructions based on other Vimnic languages and Southern Mountains Tev Creole, and abstractions. Various grammatical rules were also simplified and grammatical exceptions were generally eliminated. The governments of this region spread the modern South Vimnic language via a newly-formed religious institution in a series of fairly successful campaigns.

This effort slowed and eventually halted due to a plague whose aftermath led to civil war and an invasion by Aurwe. During this time, free compounding via South Vimnic's large amount of particles with varied lexical, phonological, and grammatical influences from the Aurwe language altered the language and led to a linguistic rift primarily between rural and urban areas. While connections between the cities improved and led to the formation of the standard dialect, more isolated parts of the country became more isolated from the language through either stagnation or independent change. After this chaotic period, the governments of the region attempted a new linguistic purist movement which was, in general, poorly received and was soon discontinued despite some early success.

Classification
South Vimnic is the indirect descendant of Old South Vimnic (a member of the Vimnic language family) as it was largely constructed from Old South Vimnic texts, but it features significant borrowings and reconstructions from other Vimnic languages and Southern Mountains Tev Creole. The Vimnic languages are a primary language family whose members are generally isolative with the modern South Vimnic being one of the exceptions (being agglutinative). South Vimnic has become one of the least related languages in its family due to its excessive construction. Below is the generalised language tree: (†) Extinct. (*) A Tev language. However, it has grammatical, phonological, and lexical similarities to the Vimnic languages and is partially derived from Old South Vimnic.
 * Proto-Vimnic†
 * North Vimnic†
 * Old Far North Vimnic†
 * Far North Vimnic
 * Old South Vimnic†
 * South Vimnic
 * Southern Mountains Tev Creole*
 * Old Upper Vimnic†
 * Middle Upper Vimnic†
 * East Vimnic
 * West Vimnic
 * Southwest Vimnic†

Dialects
Modern South Vimnic has numerous dialects:
 * Standard dialect: The dialect generally considered to be standard as it is spoken in all of the major cities and by approximately 68% of the population. It could potentially be split into slightly deviating regional dialects.

Phonotactics
There are no vowel diphthongs in South Vimnic. When a vowel precedes another vowel due to morphemes or foreign origin, ʔ is inserted between them, including between words (see Syntax). Regular vowels also become nasalised before nasal consonants with the exception of l, r, and ŕ (see Writing system).

There is also consonant harmony—mostly defined by voicing in bilabial to velar plosives, affricates, and fricatives—which prevents "voiced" consonants from being in a word with "unvoiced" consonants and vice versa. In South Vimnic, the "voice" harmony rules can be unintuitive. For example, while both r and ŕ represent voiced consonants, they are considered "unvoiced" and share the "voiced" form ṙ. If ṙ becomes "devoiced" however, it can only become r. When an "unvoiced" particle is appended a "voiced" stem, the consonants in that particle assume their "voiced" form and vice versa. There are also "neutral" consonants which do not affect a word's "voice". If a word consists of only neutral consonants, the "first-appended particle" rule applies to determine "voice" (see Syntax). The "voiced" consonants and their counterparts are detailed below with the neutral consonants.

Standard dialect
(*) Tone.
 * Regular vowels become nasalised before nasal consonants.
 * The letters l, r, and ŕ are pronounced as /n/, /ɱ/, and /ŋ/ respectively before other consonants and at the end of words. This occurrence never triggers nasalisation.

Syntax
VSO/VOS word order

Basic sentences

 * e˧˩npśo˧x le˧ʔạ˧ḿqa˧ e˧nqa˧la˧ʔ qʔǝ˧sı˧ṫxä˧˥ḣa˧?
 * Translation: Why are you going home?
 * IPA (standard pronunciation): /ˈɛ̃ː˧˩n.p͡ʂo˧x lɛ˧ˈʔãː˧.ɱqa˧ ɛ̃˧nˈqaː˧.laʔ qˀə˧.sɨ˧ˈθ͡xæː˧˥ħa˧/