Kannayn

Background
Kannayn is the official language of several provinces in the Kingdom of Gwallonia. While Gwallon is the official language of the kingdom overall, Kannayn has a reputation as a refined and sophisticated literary language, and there is little stigma against it. Kannayn is technically not an exonym, as the name that the rest of the world uses comes from a different dialect from the standard. The "native" endonym for the Standard Dialect is Kaññaun (literally "our language"). Kannayn is the dominant language among several hundred interconnected clans living in the highlands on the northern plateau of the Naidha Mountains. Censuses count approximately 3.9 million speakers, though not all speak Standard Kannayn, in fact very few actually do. Kannayn could be thought of as a dialect continuum.

Consonants
All consonants with the exceptions of v, x, h, `, and j can be geminated. Words may start with any single consonant (however ` is often not pronounced in rapid casual speech), but can only end in n, t, k, r, or s. The stops p, t, c, and k, when ungeminated, may have allophonic variation with their voiced counterparts intervocalically, but this does not apply to the fricatives.

Vowels
In unstressed positions and very commonly word finally y is often lowered to [ə]; this is typically not done in educated intentional speech. Kannayn vowels may be long or short, with the shorter versions tending to be slightly more lax. This is most apparent with the middle vowels, where even educated speakers contrast a short lax vowel with a long higher tenser one.

There are 9 diphthongs in Kannayn, all falling toward different high vowels. The a diphthongs are ai [äi], au [äu], and ay [äɨ]; the e diphthongs are ei [εi], eu [εu], and ey [εɨ]; the o diphthongs are oi [ɔi], ou [ɔu], and oy [ɔɨ]. Both vowels in the sequence are given equal weight.

Pronouns
Kannayn distinguishes between singular, dual, and plural referents across 4 persons. 1st person pronouns can be inclusive or exclusive; vaak means "I and another person", xaak means "you and I", eññan means "I and others", and eññas means "all of us". The 4th person functions as an obviative during a discourse, in order to introduce a new 3rd person referent without losing clarity. Pronouns are declined for 5 cases: nominative (subject of a sentence), accusative (object of a sentence or static prepositions), dative (indirect object of a sentence or prepositions of motion toward), genitive (possessor or object of a preposition of motion away from), and construct (possessed object, but also an instrumental).

Verbs
Verbs in Kannayn are conjugated according to person, number, tense, aspect, mood, voice, and evidence. There are 2 numbers (dual pronouns are conjugated the same as plurals) across 4 persons, as well as 2 tenses (past, nonpast), 6 aspects (imperfective, progressive, perfective, habitual, inchoative, and terminative), 2 moods (realis, irrealis), 2 voices (active, passive), and 5 evidential morphemes (gnomic, experiential, inferential, reported, intuited). There are 3 main conjugations of verbs: those whose stem ends in a short vowel, those whose stem ends in a diphthong or long vowel, and those whose stem ends in a consonant.

The default verb form is the nonpast imperfective real gnomic active. That is, a verb that is occurring during the discourse, it is not important whether the action is ongoing, habitual etc. (only that it is not completed), this can be seen as the closest to a simple present c.f. English. The action is also known to be real, and the interlocutors do not care how verifiable the information conveyed is (if it even can be verified), i.e. the facts presented in the discourse are brushed off as common knowledge. Finally, the speaker is the agent of the verb in question. This is the most unmarked a verb can be in Kannayn.

The 3 conjugations for nonpast imperfective realis gnomic active verbs are:

The past tense is used to describe any action that occurred before the present discourse. The past imperfective denotes an action that occurred at some point and whether or not that action resulted in anything, was completed, came to fruition etc. is not known or not important to the discussion. The past imperfective is the closest Kannayn has to an aorist tense.