Abashe

General information
Abasyə is a language isolate spoken in the outskirts of the Shinsali Confederacy. It is generally classified agglutinative but has various polysynthetic tendencies.

Consonants

 * Consonant gemination is contrastive in all places but word-initially

Vowels

 * There are seven diphthongs: /ai/ /au/ /eu/ /iu/ /ei/ /oi/ /əi/ which do not distinguish length
 * Any other sequences of two vowels is pronounced with hiatus

Allophony

 * /n/ assimilates to velar consonants, becoming [ŋ]
 * /m/, in contrast, does not assimilate
 * When /h/ occurs word-finally or before another consonant, there is a slight pharyngeal frication

Phonotactics
The basic syllable structure in Abasyə is (C₁)(C₂)V(C). (C₁) can be any consonant, (C₂) can be any fricative or approximant, and final (C) can be any consonant. V can be any vowel or diphthong.

Stress
Primary stress always occurs on the initial syllable of a word. Secondary stress, however, is sensitive to syllable structure but is nonetheless regular. Secondary stress falls on the first heavy syllable after the primary stress. A heavy syllable is any syllable other than a CV or V (so CLV, CFV, CVC, etc. are all heavy). If every syllable following the primary stress is light, then the secondary stress falls on the second syllable of the word.

Nouns
Nouns in Abasyə belong to one of eight noun classes and take on multiple suffixes, including number, demonstratives, postpositionals, possessives, and derivational morphemes, which includes diminutives and augmentatives, each of which has it's own seperate noun class

Noun class and pronouns
In Abasyə, nouns are arranged into a number of classes. Noun class is not apparent on noun other than from its semantic meaning. The pronouns in the third column are third-person pronouns and decline regularly. The first and second person pronouns are listed in the table below. They decline irregularly for number and in the nominative, accusative, and genitive cases.

Noun Morphology
Abasyə nouns are largely agglutinitive and can take on multiple different suffixes. Noun suffixes ultimately follow a set order. The order of suffixes is as follows:

Root • Derivation • Number • Possession • Case • Determiner • Postposition

Root
Most roots used nominally will be nouns, but a verb root or an adjectival root can be used with a derivational morpheme to form an entirely new root.

Derivation
Derivation is productive in Abasyə and roots can take on multiple derivational morphemes. Common derivational suffixes are listed in the table below with examples.

Syntax
Abasyə is an exclusively suffixing agglutinative language. The language is highly inflected and occasionally exhibits some aspects of a polysynthetic language. It most-often follows SOV word order, but word order is highly flexible.