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 agglutinative 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

Nouns and noun phrases

Sani is a tripartite language, which means that the agent of a transitive verb takes the ergative case, the object of a transitive verb takes the accusative case, and the single argument of an intransitive verb takes the intransitive case. Nouns inflect for number, determination and case, there is no grammatical gender.

Number

Sani has three numbers; singular, dual and plural. The singular is used for single objects, dual for natural pairs, like hands, and plural is used for multiple objects.

Case

There are several cases in Sani. All cases show grammatical relationships, there are no spatial cases.

Case	Suffix	Role
Ergative		Subject of a transitive verb
Accusative		Direct object of a transitive verb
Intransitive		Agent of an intransitive verb
Dative		Indirect object of a transitive verb
Genitive		Marks that a noun is related to another noun
Instrumental		Indicates a noun as the means for the subject to to achieve an action

Determination

There are three levels of determination; indeterminate, corresponding to Istvanistani a/an, and also used for abstract nouns when applicable, close determinate and far determinate. The second level is used for objects close to the speaker, and the third level is used for objects that are not close to the speaker.