Milevic languages

Milevic
Geographic distribution:	Miraria, Parshita
Linguistic classification:	Shaelic Milevic
Proto-language:	Proto-Milevic
Subdivisions:	Northern Southern Eastern
CWS code	–

The Milevic languages are a family of languages spoken in the subregion of Milevia, in south-eastern Parshita. They originated from modern day eastern Athsud and spread westwards, although the family is believed to have descended from a larger Proto-Shaelic language, additionally the ancestor of the East and West Tlukeric branches.

The most widely spoken Milevic languages on Sahar are Asthudan, Czisilian, Farmoshi, and Kaisen, all of which have at least 10 million native speakers and are official languages in their respective countries.

Common linguistic features

Morphology

The Milevic languages are generally agglutinative and predominantly suffixing, with reduplication also being a fairly common process. There are a wide range of derivational suffixes, most forming nouns or verbs. The whole family exhibits a distinction between multiple animacy classes - animate, semi-animate, and inanimate, though some languages have lost the semi-animate class. A list of noun types that are typically included in each class is as follows:

Animate:

• people
• animals
• deities
• heart, soul, mind

Semi-animate:

• dead things
• most body parts/organs/substances (not 'corpse')
• plants
• natural elements/phenomena
• groups of animate nouns
• countries
• 'processes' (e.g. death) + verbal nouns
• emotions

Inanimate:

• everything else

There is a degree of ergativity across the Milevic family; typically animate nouns are marked as nominative-accusative, inanimate nouns are marked as ergative-absolutive, and semi-animate nouns are marked as nominative-accusative but with the nominative marked using the ergative suffix and the accusative unmarked.

Nouns are marked for case and number. While cases are consistently marked using suffixes, number marking varies between branches and individual languages, both in form and scope.

Adjectives constitute a distinct lexical class in Milevic.

There are up to four distinct copulae depending on the language, distinguished based on animacy and polarity. Although all derived from the same Proto-Milevic source words, the exact nature of these copulae vary from being independent words to being affixed onto adjectives and nouns.

Classification

The three primary branches of Milevic are North Milevic, South Milevic, and East Milevic.

Writing

Prior to the colonial era, a range of indigenous Parshitan scripts, Darimic scripts were used to write Milevic languages. Chief among these in the Milevian Empire was the Decwabmẹ script, a Darimic script used widely in Farmosh until the advent of the Letso-Terminian script, and still as a ceremonial script in the modern age. Additionally, the Mahavic script is also attested to have been used to write some East Milevic languages such as Athsudi.

The Letso-Terminian script was introduced by the Terminians as contact increased from around the 16th Century CE. During the colonial era, throughout much of which Kaisen, Czisilia, Farmosh, and Otsuk were under Terminian sovereignty as the Terminian Far East, the script became more widespread and even official in the Far East. Letso-Terminian was additionally adopted to write the Athsudi language, and today most Milevic languages use a variant of this script.