Riau

Riau ewcì riaù
Pronounced:	[ɛ́wcì rʲɐù]
Timeline and Universe:	Ehryau
Spoken:	Ehryau Island
Total speakers:	105,219
Writing system:	Latin, Kùgween
Typology
Morphological type:	Agglutinative
Basic word order:	SOV
Credits
Creator:	Wehikawa
Created:	2024

Riau, also called Liau, Riaw and Lhão(ewcì riaù, [ɛ́wcì rʲɐù]) is an Igwa-Kayak language spoken on the island of Ehryau(ùùriau in Riau), originally called Eilhão by the Portuguese.

Riau is the most spoken Igwa-Kayak language by number of native speakers, with around 105,219 speaking Riau as a first language and another 6,540 who are bilingual with the closely related but much less spoken language of Awiou.

Both Riau and Awiou descend from a single common ancestor: Middle Riau, an extinct ancient language that is considered the Latin of Ehryau. It was the form of Riau that Portuguese sailors first encountered in 1567, marking the first European documentation of an Igwa-Kayak language. The sailors did not make many linguistic notes, though they did note that one peninsula was called "Kabisa(z)" by the Lhão, which sounded similar to the Portuguese word cabeças, "heads", and thus from then on they called the peninsula A Península das Cabeças, "the Peninsula of the Heads". The actual word they recorded was probably something along the lines of Middle Riau qbééxa, which meant "to snake (around)". The modern descendant of this word in modern Riau is kàbijxà, "wiggly". The modern Riau name of the peninsula is Ixkù-oorhù.

Phonology

Consonants

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar	Palatal	Glottal
Stop	p b	t d	k g	c	ʔ
Fricative		s z	(x)		h
Affricate			t͡ɕʲ d͡ʑʲ
Tap		ɾ	ɾˠ	ɾʲ
Nasal	m~n		ŋ	(ɲ)
Approximant			ʍw

Taps

Riau is notorious for its various phonemic taps. There are three types of phonemic tap in Riau, each considered a separate phoneme: alveolar, /ɾ/, velarised, /ɾˠ/, and palatalised, /ɾʲ/. They are represented by the letters ⟨r⟩, ⟨rh⟩ and ⟨ri⟩/⟨ry⟩ respectively.

Nasals

Riau is peculiar in that there is no distinction between [m] and [n], and thus generally speaking the sound is transcribed in IPA as /m~n/, and it is up to the speaker to choose whether to pronounce it [m], [n] or anything in between.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Close-mid	e ø		o
Near-open		(ɐ)*
Open	a

*[ɐ] is a variation of /a/ often pronounced in non-initial areas, such as in riaù. Though phonemically transcripted otherwise, in most Riau speakers, /a/ is only truly pronounced [a] word-initially in the jussive mood, such as in the phrase Aihèèjxmo!("Halt!"), and even then this can sometimes be realised in a centralised form, as in [ä].