Standard Gabrielt language
| Gabrielt | |
|---|---|
| មដឌុកន់ឣម្រាឃនិ Mada Dzukan Amragyani | |
| Native to | Gabrielland |
| Region | Southern Gabrielland |
| Ethnicity | Gabrielts |
Native speakers | Total:190 million (2020) |
Gabrieltic
| |
| Modified Prei Script | |
| Official status | |
Official language in |  Gabrielland Dokodo Union |
| Regulated by | Gabrielt Language Preservation Center |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | gb |
| ISO 639-2 | gab |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
Standard Gabrielt (Gabrielt: មដឌុកន់ឣម្រាឃនិ, Mada Dzukan Amragyani), colloquially known as plainly Gabrielt (Gabrielt: មដឌុកន, Mada Dzukan), is a Gabrieltic language of the Central Gabrielt branch which serves as the official standardized language of Gabrielland spoken by a total of 190 million speakers distributed throughout the country, as well as several small pockets of minorities in other Dokodo Union states and other neighboring countries. Standard Gabrielt should be contrasted with the Central Gabrielt languages, from which the language is based on.
Standard Gabrielt serves as the lingua franca of the nation, and is the sole language of instruction in schools in the Gabrielland region of the country. In the New Frontier and Arsyan Realms, the language serves as a second langauge to facilitate the differences between the native languages and the rest of the country, and is taught to children as a second language, but outside of academic and formal situations, the language is not used that often. Standard Gabrielt also serves as the neutral dialect or language across the wide array of regional Gabrielt languages which are not mutually intelligible with one another, as they form a dialect continuum. As a result, standard Gabrielt is mostly a written language for ethnic Gabrielt people, as ethnic Gabrielts would use their own regional language or dialect to communicate in daily occurences.
The language was artificially created in 1926 during the congress of all-Gabrielts as a way to further unify the newly-formed country with a neutral and easy-to-learn language for all Gabrielts, including the ethnic Arsyans which do not speak the language. The Central Gabrielt languages which was seen as the de-facto lingua franca at that time due to the capital's influence was chosen as the base of the standard language not only because of its influence but due to its central proximity and location in the middle of the expansive dialect continuum being very suitable and mimicking features of other regional languages, so that other Gabrielts learning the language would have an equal amount of difficulty in learning the new standard language. As of 2019, 99% of Gabrielts are reported to be able to understand Standard Gabrielt.
The Prei script is used to write Standard Gabrielt, as the script was already being used to write the various regional languages of Gabrielland even before the advent of the new standard language came to place in the late 1920s. Usage of the Latin script has grown over the past few decades with Gabrielland joining the Dokodo Union and with the country entering an era of rapid globalization, however, the government has stated that the Prei script will continue to be used for virtually all aspects when dealing with Standard Gabrielt, and is Gabrielland's one of two official scripts, the other one being the Arsyan script solely used to write the various Arsyan languages.
Name
The term "Standard Gabrielt" is the proper way to call the name of the language. The term was coined at the 1926 all-Gabrielts congress as the sole lingua franca uniting the various Gabrielt languages spoken in the Gabrielland area. While in colloquial speech the correct term is often referred to plainly as "Gabrielt", the term Gabrielt in the field of linguistics refers to the group of languages collectively spoken by the Gabrielt people. In Standard Gabrielt, the term មដឌុកន់ឣម្រាឃនិ "Standard Gabrielt language" is the official term of the langauge. មដឌុកន់ "Gabrielt language" or simply ឌុកន់ "Gabrielt" are also used in colloquial speech when context is clear as to what the speaker is referring to. Hence, a singular "Gabrielt language" simply does not exist, and most of the time refers back to the Standard Gabrielt language.
History
WIP
Phonology
Standard Gabrielt has a simple phonology with a 23 consonant system and a 5 vowel system. There exists two diphthongs, namely /ai̯/ and /au̯/.
Consonants
Gabrielt is a palatal-heavy language, and is evident by the number of palatals which exist in the langauge and their relative frequency in spoken and written examples. The palatal /ɟ/ is often cited as one of the most universal sounds across the Gabrielt languages, and is therefore one of the most common sounds in the language besides the nasals, vowels, and the bilabials. Note that the glottal stop [ʔ] does not constitute its own sound or phoneme in the langauge, and is simply used in intervocalic vowels which do not form a diphthong, usually in the form of compound words or formations. Such attributes are represented with the letter អ in the Prei script, and is often attributed as a "neutral letter."
Below is the consonant chart for Standard Gabrielt.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||
| Plosive | voiceless | p | t | c | k | |
| voiced | b | d | ɟ | ɡ | ||
| Affricate | voiceless | t͡ʃ | ||||
| voiced | d͡ʒ | |||||
| Fricative | voiceless | s | ʃ | h | ||
| voiced | v | z | ||||
| Approximant | w | l | j | |||
| Trill | r | |||||
Standard Gabrielt has a few cases of irregularities a
- In almost all cases, when an [n] which acts as the coda of a syllable meets [k], [c], or [ɟ] which in turn is the onset of another following syllable, [ŋ] is always used as an allophone of [n], as shown in the examples តន្កិ tanki "tank" which has a pronounciation of [ˈtʰäŋki]. Some special cases which this phenomenon does not occur is either when the conjuction in question is due to the result of compounding, with the example of តន់ឃនិ tangyani "education". It should be important to note that the Prei script equivalent for the word does not use a subscript form for "ngya" and uses a shirek or "stop" on the n.
- The aspiration of [t] and [k] only occurs when the syllable in question is a stressed syllable. Aspiration may also occur when the phoneme in question is a coda which meets another unvoiced plosive in an onset position. Examples include កម់ kam "high" which is pronounced as [ˈkʰäm], and បត្កិម់ batkim "window" pronounced as [batʰˈkʰɪm]
- [v] is often a [w] or even [u̯] depending on dialect in coda positions for all vowels except /u/ and /o/, in which the original sound is retained. An example is តវ tav "hand" which is almost always pronounced as [ˈtʰäw] or [ˈtʰau̯]. Note the levelling of the vowel when appendixed with a [w] instead of a vowel. In carefull speech, the pronounciation [ˈtʰav] is acceptable, resembling it to the original capital dialect it was based on.