Tuhia

Tuhia is the official language of the City of Tuhia (a city-state on the southern coast of Qèmxa contitent). It is also spoken in the surrounding area along with many other related dialects and languages. However, because of the location of these dialects & languages, they do not have offical recognition compared to standard Tuhia. It is estimated that about 6-7 million people speak Tuhia natively, but it is spoken much more widely as a trade language due to the historical and modern trade status of the city and the other southern city-states in the region (all of which speak similar languages). It is written with a mixed alphabet-syllabary system. This system has some persistent historical spelling and occianal abbreviation/ligature. Tuhia is generally considered to be a relatively easy language to learn as it is low on irregularites and relatively simple to write. A brief description is provied below:

Phonology

Consonants:

Items in parenthesis indicate orthography, brackets allophones.

Note: all* consonants can be geminated (indicated by doubling of letter) *except for intervocallic allophones

[β], [ð̻], [ð̺], [ɣ] are intervocallic allophones of b, j, d, g respectively

[t̻͡s̻], [d̻͡z̻], [t̺͡s̺], [d̺͡z̺], [t͡ʃ], [d͡ʒ], [ʃ̻], [ʃ̺] are palatalization allophones of c, j, t, d, k, g, z, s respectively

The vowels that trigger palatalization are i*, äi, e, ii (i* sometimes, depends on historical vowel)

Vowels: