Parseltongue

Parseltongue-inspired
Pronounced:	n.a.
Timeline and Universe:	Harry Potter world
Species:	Ophidic (snakes and snake-likes)
Spoken:	All over the HP world
Total speakers:	unknown
Writing system:	n.a.
Genealogy:	Isolate
Typology
Morphological type:	Inflecting
Morphosyntactic alignment:	Accusative
Basic word order:	SOV
Credits
Creator:	Eugene Oh
Created:	July 2005

Parseltongue is a fictional language spoken by snakes in the Harry Potter series of novels (author: J. K. Rowling), whose known human speakers include the Lord Voldemort and Harry Potter. This language has, however, not been publicly described by Rowling and has no known form.

The Parseltongue referred to below in this article refers to Parseltongue-inspired, a hypothetical form of the abovementioned snake-speak. Because the tongue has no written form, the text samples appearing hereafter are in romanised form.

Phonology

Consonants

Being a language spoken by snakes and the like, Parseltongue, while having the complete basic plosive repertoire (p/b, t/d, k/g), is rich in sibilants and other fricatives, which occur at a far higher frequency. Plosives also assimilate frequently to neighbouring fricatives or sonorants.

Consonants
	Bilabial		Labiodental		Alveolar		Post-alv.		Velar		Glottal
Nasal		m				n
Plosive	p	b			t	d			k	g
Fricative			f	v	s		ʃ				h
Affricate					ts	dz		tʃ
Approximants	ʍ	w
Trill						r
Lateral Approximant						l

Assimilation

Due to the inherent tendency of snakes (and hence their human inheritors of Parsetongue) to fricativise sounds, plosives commonly assimilate to neighbouring continuants (including aspirate stops), even across word boundaries, except where plosives are geminate. Regressive assimilation is the most common, and changes of the following types have been observed:

• p + fricative = labialised fricative (e.g. pf = f^w)
• b + fricative = v + voiced fricative (e.g. bth = vð)
  • Occasionally, complete assimilation occurs, e.g. vð becomes ðð.
• t + fricative = geminate fricative
• d + fricative = geminate voice fricative
• k + fricative = x + fricative = geminate fricative in certain cases

When followed by a h, whether or not separated by a vowel or diphthong, plosives are aspirated, eliding the h, and in some progressive dialects fricativise.

• E.g. t + h' = t^h or θ

The velar plosives exhibit a slightly irregular pattern of fricativisation, and examples as illustrated below have been noted:

• k/k (i.e. across word boundaries) = χ
• g is frequently elided

With sonorants, devoicing frequently occurs before a fricative:

• m + h = devoiced m
• r + h = devoiced r or hr
• l + h = devoiced l or hl
  • l + fricative sometimes causes the l to vocalise to an u

Frequently, intervocalic h is elided.

See also [[{{{1}}}]] for more information

Vowels

Vowels
	Front		Near-front		Central		Near-back		Back
High	i	y							ɯ	u
Near-high								ʊ
High-mid			e							o
Mid					ə
Low-mid			ɛ							ɔ
Near-low			æ
Low					a

The above template is designed with spaces for the most common sounds of natural languages and the symbols thereof pre-included. As this template is meant to be inserted by means of a {{Vowels}}<!-- WARNING: template loop detected --> command line, users are free to add necessary spaces or delete extraneous ones according to their needs.