The Kyol Language Family, Part I: Protolanguage Phonology

Yes, I’m making another language family.

I’m taking a break from the last one until I have a more clear idea of where it fits. The cultures I had speaking those languages have been undergoing a lot of flux, as I’m still unsure where they fit into this world, and how I need to change them so that they work better. To continue developing those languages, I need a better understanding of their speakers – so they’re on hold until I can do that.

This language family shouldn’t have that problem. It’s in the part of the world that I’m currently developing. The protolanguage that I’m going to be talking about today originated in the Kyol River Valley. Languages of this family will be the dominant languages across the reaches of the empires descended from the bronze-age Kyol Alleigance.

Let’s now look at the phonology of that protolanguage:

This is a somewhat unconventional table. Primarily, this is because the main speakers of Proto-Kyol weren’t human, but Golkh – a species of bipedal sapient evolved from raccoon-like organisms. Because they still had a procyonid-esque jaw, their lips weren’t as mobile as human lips. This has a few consequences:

a. While Golkh can pronounce bilabials, they’re harder to produce, and thus rarer. The exception is the bilabial nasal /m/, which is simply formed with a closed mouth, and thus perfectly pronouncable to a Golkh.

b. Golkh can’t produce rounded vowels or labialized consonants.

It should be noted that the vowel ɤ is sulcalized. This means that it’s pronounced with a grooved tongue, similar to a sibilant fricative. This gives it a rounder sound, and thus helps to distinguish it from front vowels. Sulcalization is most documented in the extinct language Tillamook, but it has also been suggested that received pronunciation’s /ɒ/ is sulcalized, not rounded, in some speakers.

Now let’s note some of the other unusual things here. 

a. The inclusion of a full palatal series. I wanted this language to sound harsh and rasping, but given the number of other languages with uvulars I have planned for this world, I didn’t want to include them here. (Also, they seem like the obvious choice.) I like the palatals – they give a kind of gnashing hissing sound.

b. The three-vowel system, and specifically that I included an o-analogue over a u-analogue. I wanted to use as minimal a vowel system as possible, for reasons that’ll become apparent next post. I initially had a four-vowel system with both /ɤ/ and /ɯ/, but I found I wasn’t using /ɯ/ at all, so condensed it into this system. A vowel triangle with a mid back vowel is unusual, but not unheard of – it’s the system of piraha, and the short-vowel system of Ojibwe.

  • It’s quite possible that there was an /ɯ/ at some point that either merged with /ɤ/ or /i/; it’s also possible that there was an /e/ that merged with /i/ or /a/. We’ll explore these possibilities later.

c. The extra nasals & laterals. Partially, I want more phonemes – the somewhat constrained root structure of this language and the lack of labials means I’ll take what I can get. Also, I like the sound of them.