Sani language

The Sani language is the language spoken by the Sani people. It has around 10 million speakers, mostly living in Talenore and Shireroth, with scattered communities in other nations. It is an official language in Talenore. Together with the Amarri language it constitutes the Cosimo-Benacian language family which is not related to any other known language family. Some linguists believe it to be the remnants of the languages spoken before the Istvanistani and Praeta speakers migrated to eastern Benacia. Sani is an isolating language with no grammatical gender and the simple basic syllable structure CV.

Current status

Sani is an official language in Talenore, alongside Istvanistani, Babkhi and Elw. It is also a recognized minority language in Lywind and Amarr and the majority language on Azarea.

Classification

Main article: Cosimo-Benacian languages.

The Sani language belongs to the Cosimo-Benacian language family, together with its relative Amarri. The family is a language isolate with no known relatives. Its homeland is southeastern Benacia, where Sani is still spoken in Amarr, Lywind and on Azarea, and Amarri spoken in Amarr. The largest Cosimo-Benacian-speaking group is located in Talenore however. The entire family has around 12 million speakers, with ten million speaking Sani and around two million speaking Amarri.

Vocabulary

The largest part of the Sani vocabulary is Cosimo-Benacian in origin. The language has significant loans from Istvanistani, especially in the areas of science and technology. It also has loanwords primarily from Praeta, Elw and Babkhi.

Phonology

Sani has 22 consonant phonemes and five vowel phones, which form ten phonemes in short and long pairs.

Consonants

	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Plosive	p | p'	t | t'			k | k'	q	ʔ
Nasal	m	n			ŋ
Trill		r̥ | r
Fricative		s	ʃ		x		h
Lateral		ɬ | l
Approximant			j		ʍ | w

Note: The plosives show regular form to the left and ejective form to the right. The trill, lateral and approximant with two forms show unvoiced to the left and voiced to the right.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	u
Open-Mid	e-ɛ-ə		o-ɔ
Open		a

Each vowel comes in a short and a long version. Long vowels are only found in stressed syllables.

Phonotactics

Sani syllables consist of a mandatory onset consisting of a consonant and a mandatory nucleus containing a vowel. The most common syllable is CV, but there are also CVV and CVN syllables, where N is any nasal, trill, fricative, lateral, or /j/. The last consonant in a CVN syllable often affects the pronunciation of the initial consonant in the following syllable resulting in gemination or assimilation. The vowel pair in a CVV syllable is realized as two separate vowel sounds and not a diphthong.

Stress

Stress falls on the first syllable containing a long vowel or, if there is no long vowel, the first syllable containing an ejective consonant. If there are no long vowels or ejective consonants, stress falls on the last syllable.

Orthography

Sani is romanized according to the following rules.

Phoneme	Romanization
p	p
p'	b
t	t
t'	d
k	k
k'	g
q	q
ʔ	' (old), c (new)
m	m
n	n
ŋ	ng
r̥	rh
r	r
s	s
ʃ	sh
x	x
h	h
ɬ	ll (old), lh (new)
l	l
j	y
ʍ	wh
w	w
a	a
e, ɛ, ə	e
i	i
o, ɔ	o
u	u

Grammar

Sani is an isolating language with the basic syntax subject-verb-object. While Sani has no affixes it does have an extensive set of particles conveying such things as verb tense, mood, aspect, noun number, case, location and several other grammatical functions.

Nouns and noun phrases

Number

Sani has two numbers; singular and plural. The singular is used for single objects and plural is used for multiple objects.