Ziba

Ziba
ziba
Pronunciation	IPA: [ziba]
Region	Northern Southeast Coius
Ethnicity	Dezevauni people, Dhavoni people, Gowsas
Native speakers	~200,000,000
Language family	Zibaic
Standard forms	Harmonised Ziba (Dezevau)
Dialects	Agudan Ziba Asterian Ziba Central Ziba Doboadane Ziba Eastern Ziba Northwest Ziba Southwest Ziba
Writing system	Ziba script
Official status
Official language in	Dezevau Lavana
Recognised minority language in	Carucere Hacyinia
Regulated by	Ziba Harmonisation Agency (Dezevau)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Countries where Ziba is an official or national language   Countries where Ziba is a recognised or regional language but not an official or national language

Ziba is the only extant language of the eponymous Zibaic language family. It originated in and is the main language in Dezevau and northern Lavana, and it also has legal recognition in Hacyinia and Carucere. It is spoken by over 200 million people worldwide, making it one of the most spoken languages in the world.

Ziba originated in southwest Dezevau several millennia ago, possibly as a contact language. It spread by trade and diplomacy among the region's city-states and other polities, as well as through migration, and association with Badi. In the medieval period, it is believed that in large areas of northern Southeast Coius, Ziba was used in public, commercial, political, religious and diplomatic life, but coexisted with a variety of languages which were spoken natively at home. At least in southwest Dezevau and among some classes, however, it was also a domestic language.

The Aguda Empire, founded in 1476, established Ziba as the official language throughout its territories, using it in administration, spreading it through commerce, deepening its Badist usage, and generally promoting it as part of its assimilative policies. The situation of Ziba-home language dualism collapsed across much of the Aguda Empire's territory, in favour of Ziba monolingualism. Ziba took on more of an ethnic-political implication as a result of the empire's policies. The Aguda Empire also conducted early efforts at language reform and standardisation, with Agudan Ziba becoming the basis for virtually all later prestige dialects of Ziba. During the colonial and post-colonial periods, Ziba lost much of its status and reach outside of present-day Dezevau and Lavana, as colonial or national languages were promoted instead. It remains an important world language, with many of its neighbours retaining loanwords from it, and it being the working language of the Brown Sea Community.

Ziba is an agglutinative language, with a great deal of suffixation to create new nouns and adjectives, sharing similarities in this with the neighbouring !Austronesian languages. Verbs, in comparison, exist simply within a SVO or SOV sentence structure. Ziba's possible roots as a contact language, and its storied use as a second language in the public sphere may be linked to its simple grammar and small phonemic inventory; it has twelve consonants and five vowels (which can form further diphthongs). Its inventory is unusual, however, in not having any rounded vowels, unvoiced consonants/voicing distinction, and a number of other features which are very cross-linguistically common. Virtually all Ziba is written in the Ziba script, which is somewhere between an alphabet and an abugida; it has had a very close phonetic correspondence since the orthographic reforms of the Aguda Empire.

Phonology

Consonants

Ziba has twelve consonants, being not altogether dissimilar in size or selection to some of the !Austronesian languages which Ziba is a neighbour to. There are, however, some cross-linguistically unusual features, namely: that all the consonants are voiced, or that there is no voicing distinction; that cross-linguistically common voiced consonants such as the voiced alveolar lateral approximant (l) or the voiced labial–velar approximant (w), and that there is a distinction between a sibilant and non-sibilant fricative.

The "regular" articulatory distribution of Ziba consonants may be regarded as a form of systematic phonemic differentiation, though it may also have been influenced by intentional prescriptive language reform in the Aguda Empire. The collapsing of voicing may also be a relatively recent and related feature.

Consonant phonemes

		Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Nasal		m	ɱ	n	ɲ	ŋ
Stop		b	b̪	d	ɟ	g
Fricative	sibilant			z
	non-sibilant			ð̠

Vowels

For monophthongs, Ziba has a fairly straightforward five vowel system. Notably, however, it lacks rounded vowels in most dialects.

Ziba has diphthongs, which occupy the same phonotactic position as monophthongs. A diphthong can be formed from any two monophthongs other than the mid central vowel (ə). This formula means there are twelve possible diphthongs.

Vowel phonemes

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		ɯ
Mid		ə
Open	a		ɒ

Phonotactics

Ziba prescribes a syllable structure of CV. This somewhat unusual strictness can be a cause of difficulty when transcribing into Ziba from other languages.

The abugida or abugida-like and cursive Ziba script corresponds to the phonotactics, inasmuch as there is no usual way to write consonant clusters, consonantless vowels or triphthongs.