Khamaian language

Khamaian
Kham-Amaian Kám-aman sìim
Pronunciation	[qɑ́mɑmaj ɕìjʉ]
Ethnicity	Amaian people, Khamv people
Native speakers	25 million  (2017)
Language family	East-Mirarian languages Khamaian
Early forms:	Proto-East-Mirarian Proto-Amaian Khamaian
Dialects	Gynnyn dialect, Western Khamaian dialect, Eastern Khamaian dialect
Writing system	Vaniuan script, Khamv script
Official status
Official language in	Amaia, Khambvan
CWS code	–

The 'Khamaian language is a pluricentric Eastern Mirarian dialect continuum spoken by a total of 25 million in Amaia and Khambvan, though it is usually considered as two separate languages, Amaian and Khamv.

History

Khamaian was recognized as a single language from the beginnings of its recorded history in the mid-1st millennium. However, with the influx of Paroan peoples into what is now Khambvan during the 12th century, and the resulting introduction of a caste system in Kham-Amaian society, a split between Paroanized and conservative speech varieties began to form. The definition of separate Khamv and Amaian languages first arose in the 16th century as people of the Ama caste moved into the Gynnyn area and established a state with a distinct cultural identity- from its genesis, the separation of Khamv and Amaian languages was largely based on cultural rather than linguistic elements.

Khamv and Amaian separated consciously in a linguistic sense during the early 20th century as Khambvan split from Amaia to form an isolationist theocracy. During this period, Amaian was cleansed of all Paroan loans and Khamv borrowed even more heavily from its liturgical tongue of Paroan. A unified Amaian standard was formed based on the speech of Geswi, the capital. Geswi had always been considered a neutral intermediary between the various regions of Amaia both geographically and socio-culturally.

The history of Khamaian dialects is more difficult to define as the differences mainly concern the non-front high vowels, which have almost always shared the same glyph in Amaian orthography, and pitch-accent, which is unwritten. Thus, there are few written records displaying dialectal distinctions. However, based on their present distribution it seems that Gynnyn dialect is the result of the first migration of the Ama caste northwards to a location separated from the rest of Khamaian, while Western Khamaian dialect and Eastern Khamaian dialect split some time later before the Partition of Khambvan and Amaia.

Geography

Officially, Khamaian is spoken by the entire population of Amaia and Khambvan- the respective national variants are the national languages of each. However, large regions of northern and eastern Amaia are extremely sparsely populated, and additionally it is estimated there is a population of about 5000 or so monolingual speakers of Voontic languages in rural northwestern Amaia. Khamaian is also spoken by a small population of Eastern Mirarian descent in Balakia, as well as by a greater diaspora of about 100,000 around Sahar.

Phonology

Khamaian phonology presents a descriptive challenge due to its pervasive system of front/back harmony in both consonants and vowels, as well as dialectal and allophonic variation in the non-front high vowels. In this article we will be following usual conventions in attributing consonant harmony to vowel effects, and underlying separations in /u/ and /ɨ/ which are collapsed in some dialects.

Consonants

	Labial	Alveolar	Dorsal
Plain nasal	m	n
Voiceless Plosive	p	t	k
Voiced Plosive	b	d	g
Voiceless Affricate		t͡s
Voiced Affricate		d͡z
Voiceless Fricative	sʷ	s
Voiced Fricative	zʷ	z
Flap	ⱱ	ɺ

Note the presence of the two whistled sibilants.

All consonants are palatalized before a front vowel, and velars are backed before a non-front vowel. The labiodental flap becomes a voiced labial plosive when palatalized in most speech varieties.

The two flaps are occasionally realized as implosives word-initially.

Vowels

Khamaian is unusual in completely lacking phonemic rounded vowels, although back vowels are often allophonically rounded after the whistled sibilants.

Monophthongs	Front	Mid	Back
Close	i	ɨ	u
Open-mid	e		ʌ
Open	æ		ɑ

Pitch-Accent

Stress always falls on the first syllable of a word, and may be in either high or low pitch accents. That is, there is only one pitch accent per word. In Eastern Khamaian especially, low pitch accent is instead realized as high pitch on the second syllable of a multisyllabic word.

Phonotactics

Syllable structure is (C)V(C).

Orthography

Orthography represents one of the largest differences between Khamv and Amaian. Khamv is written in the Khamv script, while Amaian is written in the Vaniuan script used in all of Vaniu.

Grammar

Morphology

Khamaian nouns decline for number and case. The numbers are singular and plural, with an additional dual in pronouns. Case includes agentive, patientive, oblique, and locative. Pronouns additionally decline in an emphatic-reflexive form. The oblique is used for genitive and dative purposes. The patientive is usually not distinguished from agentive in common nouns in Amaian except for fossilized phrases and old-fashioned speech- the agentive is there known as the direct form.

Declension interacts in complicated ways with pitch accent and stem changes are known to occur- in this sense Khamaian is a highly fusional language. Pitch accent paradigms in declension are one of the main distinctions between the dialects, with Gynnyn dialect exhibiting the most patterns, while Western Khamaian regularizes the form of the locative to agree with that of the plural direct in most cases. Eastern Khamaian has the simple rule that plural and locative take the opposite pitch from the singular direct form. Across Khamaian, there is the constraint that if the singular direct and plural direct take the same pitch accent, then the locative must take that same one as well. Another rule is that oblique forms take the same pattern as plural direct ones, while both numbers of the locative take the same pitch.

Verbs conjugate for a variety of tense-aspect-mood-evidentiality-polarity forms and are almost exclusively suffixing in both inflectional and derivational morphology.

Other parts of speech do not inflect.

Syntax

Khamaian word order is primarily SOV, although Khamv displays some variation under influence from Paroan, a motivation for retaining the patientive case. Numerals and possessive pronouns follow noun heads, but apart from that noun phrases are also highly head-final.

See also

• Khamaian languages
• East-Mirarian languages
• Proto-Amaian language
• Khambvan
• Amaia