Maichun language

The Maichun language, also Kalami or archaically Amaichun is a language endemic to Kalam, specifically the Maichun people of therein. It is the most popular language in the Kalamic linguistic family.

Name

The name "Maichun" itself comes from the Maichun language, a mix of the affix "Amai", meaning "They", "Chu" meaning a sound or noise of any sort, and "Un", meaning "To have" and also serving as a possessive affix. The "Amai" affix was later shortened to "Mai" as the language evolved, and "Chu-un" was shortened to "Chun" for simplicity.

Modern status

Currently Maichun stands as Kalam's de facto official language, but pushes by the ethnically diverse government have managed to preserve the translation of relevant legal documents into other widely spoken Kalami languages such as Chiche and Tsaju.

History

It's likely that the Maichun language originates from northern Kalam, given the Maichun people's origin being placed around Pacha and expanding from there as their clans traveled across Kalam.

Orthography

Maichun writing has 12 consonants and 5 vowels, /IL and /u/ are capitalized to represent /j/ and /w/ respectively, also being treated as vowels. They also have a character similar to the hyphen which connects postfixes and certain two word pairs. Long vowels are distinguished with duplicated letters.

Their alphabet (Romanized in this case) is organized as K, Q, R (ɾ), T, S, H, K, L, N, M, RR (/r/), P, CH (/t͡ʃ/), ' (/ʔ/), -, E, A, O, I, U, and loaned letters from the Tsaju script for sounds such as /d/ and /b/.

Phonology

Maichun technically has 15 phonemically distinct consonant sounds including the glottal stop, with /w/ and /j/ being treated simultaneously as phonemes and as variations of /u/ and /i/.

Vowels

/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, with their long variants occurring only in Modern Maichun sound shifts but also being annotated in writing

Technically all w:diphthongs are possible is necessary, but if /u/ directly precedes or succeeds a consonant phoneme it tends to become /w/ in its stead.

Consonants

The Maichun consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /q/ and /ʔ/ as plosives, without any unvoiced plosives. Their only nasals are /n/ and /m/, both unvoiced nasals. They use /j/ and /w/ as vowel variants as previously mentioned. Finally they use /r/, /ɾ/, /s/ and /l/.

Phonotactics

Maichun follows the CVVVC (/w/ and /j/ counting as medial sounds that can take the place of vowels) sylablle structure, so whenever two consonants seem to cluster they are/are treated as parts of different syllables.

While words can end in consonants, they will always naturally end in /n/, /m/, /t͡ʃ/, /h/ or accommodate for that to be the case.