Ngolu

Ngolu Ilia (Te)
Spoken:	Áu
Total speakers:	100,000 (approx.)
Genealogy:	Isolate (as far as known)
Typology
Morphological type:	Isolating/futional
Morphosyntactic alignment:	Nominative-Accusative
Basic word order:	VSO
Credits
Creator:	Imralu
Created:	2013-2014

Ngolu, also known as Te or Ilia Te (endonym: ilia (te) IPA: [ìʎá(té)]) is a language isolate spoken throughout the space habitat Áu by the Ngolu people, whose number is estimated to be around 100,000. As the Ngolu are almost entirely monolingual, and while travel to and from Áu remains almost impossible, the language is not in any danger of extinction. At this stage, little is known of dialect differences.

Ngolu is an isolating/fusional, head-initial (right-branching) language with VSO word order and nominative-accusative alignment. Verbs (verbals) make up the only open class of word, with nouns (nominals) constituting a closed class of heavily fusional words that fill the roll of pronouns and articles in other languages, marking grammatical person, gender, number, case, definiteness and specificity.

Terminology

The Ngolu usually call their language ilia [ìʎá], which simply means 'language' or 'speech'. Many Ngolu in Áu do not recognise foreign languages such as English as communication when they hear them, and tend to refer to anything said in another language as maramaria [màɾàmàdʒá] ('babbling' or 'nonsense'). Ngolu on Earth have observed other languages being used between multiple people and typically recognise foreign languages as being capable of conveying meaning. The word ilia in that case refers to all languages. To disambiguate their own language, they may call it ilia te [ìʎáté] 'good language' (or sometimes ilia golu [ìʎáŋòlú] or ilias áu [ìʎásáw]).

The word áu [áw] means 'world' but specifically refers to the world Áu, not to Earth (which is known as aásu [àásù] or uuásu [ùwásù]). The English ethnonym 'Ngolu' derives from golu [ŋòlú] meaning 'person' or 'people'.

Phonology

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i ‹i›		u ‹u›
Mid	e ‹e›		o ‹o›
Low		a ‹a›

Each vowel may be 'strong' or 'weak'. The pronunciation of strong vowels varies across accents but it generally equates to a high tone whereas 'weak' vowels have a low tone. There is only ever one 'strong' vowel per word and it is nearly always the final vowel. Where it is not, it is always the penultimate vowel and the in that case the final vowel is always /i/ or /u/. Non-final strong vowels are indicated in the romanisation using an acute accent, ‹áéíóú›.

The high vowels, /i/ and /u/, when weak and adjacent to another vowel are pronounced non-syllabically as [i̯~j] and [u̯~w]). Non-syllabic /i/ merges with and palatalises any preceding dental/alveolar consonant.

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labiovelar	Dental/Alveolar	Post-alveolar	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m ‹m›		n ‹n›		ŋ ‹g›
Plosive	b ‹b›		t ‹t›		k ‹k›	ʔ ‹q›
Ejective			tʼ ‹tt›		kʼ ‹kk›
Voiced Fricative		v ‹v›	z ‹z›	ʒ ‹j›
Voiceless Fricative			s ‹s›	ʃ ‹x›		h ‹h›
Tap			ɾ ‹r›
Lateral			l ‹l›

• The normal pronunciation of /n t tʼ ɾ l/ is dental. When these consonants are followed by a non-syllabic /i/, they are palatalised to [ɲ tʃ tsʼ dʒ ʎ] and the /i/ disappears.
• /ɾ/ is frequently pronounced as a voiced dental plosive.
• /s/ and /z/ are normally alveolar. When followed by a non-syllabic /i/, they are not distinguished from /ʃ ʒ/.
• /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ cannot be followed by non-syllabic /i/.

Morphology

Nominals

Nominals are a large but closed class of words that inflect for number, gender, grammatical person, definiteness, specificity and case. They can appear on their own or can be followed by a verbal. When followed by a verbal, they can be regarded as the head of an underlying relative clause which nominalises the verbal and allows it to function as an argument in the sentence. They are essentially the equivalent of pronouns and articles in other languages.

As a pronoun:

xu

NOM.3s.DEF.INAN

"the thing"

= it

As an article:

xu	mala
NOM.3s.DEF.INAN.REL	be.house
"the thing that"	"is a house"

= the house