Araçanic

Araçanic
Writing system	Xudha logography, Xudha abugida (For proper names and loanwords)
Official status
Spoken in	Araçana
Speaker
Endonym	zeha Zana /s̪e.ha s̪a.na/
Technical information

Araçanic is the official language of and language most commonly spoken in Araçana.

Phonology

Consonants

Araçanic distinguishes between 17 consonants phonemically.

	Labial	Denti-Alveolar	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m		n	ɲ
Unvoiced Plosive	p	t			k
Voiced Plosive	b	d		dʒ	g
Fricative		s̪	s	ʃ	x	h
Lateral			l
Trill			r

Word-Boundaries' Sandhi

Word-initial voiceless stops are usually only weakly unvoiced when uttered directly after a word ending in a vowel or /r/, and the fricatives /s̪/, /s/, /ʃ/, and /x/ are fully voiced to [z̪], [z], [ʒ], [ɣ] in the same circumstances.

/t/, the only stop permitted to end a word, is not pronounced [t] in that position save for when it ends an utterance. If the following word begins with a vowel, the /t/ is pronounced as [d], or increasingly [ð] by younger speakers. If the following word begins with a consonant, the /t/ is usually realized as gemination of that consonant.

Controversy About Murmured Stops

Many older analyses of Araçanic's consonant inventory included the murmured stops /bʱ/, /dʱ/, and /dʒʱ/, which are now usually represented in phonemic trascriptions as sequences of a voiced stop and /h/. In ancient forms of the language, these sequences were treated as single phonemes, along with aspirated stops like */pʰ/ and */tʰ/, which have since weakened to modern day fricatives. However, sound changes such as the loss of coda consonants before /bh/, /dh/, and /dʒh/, and the emergence of new clusters like /mh/ and /s̪h/ make it more convenient to treat these as clusters.

Other Allophonic Rules

/g/ is pronounced [ɣ] between vowels.

The sequence /dr/ is pronounced as a geminate trill [rː].

/n/ assimilates to [n̪] before a following denti-alveolar consonant.

/n/ becomes [ŋ] before /g/ and before /k/, although sequences of /nk/ appear only in loanwords.

Vowels

Araçanic distinguishes between 5 vowels phonemically.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e		o
Open		a

Allophony

The vowel /a/ is raised in pronunciation to [ɘ] when the next syllable contains an /i/ or an /u/. This does not bode well for Umlaut haters in the future.

Stress

Stress in Araçanic is almost always predictable, occuring in the first syllable of words. The exception is that when a word is made definite by attaching the definite affix to its start, the stress is not moved and remains on the now-second syllable. In some cases this is the sole phonetic difference between two words that would otherwise be homophones, such as in the pair ingruhu [ˈiŋ.ɡru.hu], meaning "sea vegetable," and in-gruhu [iŋ.ˈɡru.hu], meaning "the hand."

Romanization

The current standard for writing Araçanically using Latin characters was only put in place as recently as May 2025, and because of this, many words in English and other Latin script languages that have been loaned from Araçanic are spelled differently from their Araçanic counterparts, including the English name of the language itself.

2025 Standard Araçanic Latin Alphabet

Letter	Letter Name	Phoneme		Letter	Letter Name	Phoneme		Letter	Letter Name	Phoneme		Letter	Letter Name	Phoneme
A a	a	/a/		I i	i	/i/		Ñ ñ	ñu	/ɲ/		U u	u	/u/
B b	be	/b/		J j	je	/dʒ/		O o	o	/o/		X x	xa	/x/, /ʃ/ (before i)
D d	de	/d/		K k	ke	/k/		P p	pe	/p/		Xi xi	xia	/ʃ/
E e	e	/e/		L l	le	/l/		R r	ra	/r/		Z z	za	/s̪/
G g	age	/g/		M m	mu	/m/		S s	sa	/s/
H h	aha	/h/		N n	nu	/n/		T t	te	/t/

Grammar

Noun Phrases

Definiteness

Nouns in Araçanic can be made definite by adding a cliticized article to the beginning of the word. This causes the initial sounds of those words to change in unpredictable ways, due to historical sound changes.

Nouns which denote features like the sun or the bedrock do not ever become definite. Otherwise definite nouns being described by adjectives which already define them are not marked as definite either. For example, if there are two books, and one wished to refer to specifically the blue one, the blue book would be referred to with ori lamha "Blue book"/"A blue book" instead of ir-ori lamha "The blue book."

Case

Araçanic nouns are declined into six cases: The nominative, accusative, lative, ablative, locative, and genitive cases.

DECLENSIONS CHARTS UP NEXT

Verbs

Verbal Aspect

Verbs in Araçanic come in four forms: an form known as the "unmarked" form, a form marked as perfective, a form marked as habitual, and a form marked as cessative. For example, these are the forms of the word zeha, meaning "speak" or "sign":

Unmarked	Perfective	Habitual	Cessative
zeha	zehage	zeho	zehaxa

The unmarked forms of the verb cannot be used on their own. Instead, the unmarked form can be turned into a adjective-like participle phrase with the addition of the particle da. To express the continuous, continuative, and inchoative aspects, this participle is nominalized by using it to describe the word nan, which means "thing" or "what," and the verbs ran, xaz, and irat, which mean "be at," "go," and "make," respectively, are applied to this nominalized phrase. In the present tense, ran is left out as a zero-copula of sorts. Note that nan will end up in the locative case for continuous verbs, the lative case for continuative verbs, and the accusative case for inchoative verbs. Any patient of the action is put into the genitive case after the nominalized verb. For example, the sentence U narer angar dha ingi means something like "I'm eating it," but literally it says "I'm at the eating of it," or "I'm at its eating." Da is usually contracted to pronouns that may follow it, as in da izar becoming d-ezar.

In the present tense, continuative statements can also be interpreted as gnomic.

The following table shows all 6 possible aspects in the past tense, using the verb angar "eat," a first-person subject, and a third-person object:

Sentence	Gloss	Aspect	English Translation
U ran ir narer angar d-ezar.	1p at PAST thing-LOC eat PRET 3p-GEN	Continuous	I was eating it.
U xaz ir nari angar d-ezar.	1p go PAST thing-LAT eat PRET 3p-GEN	Continuative	I was still eating it.
U irat ir nangi angar d-ezar.	1p make PAST thing-ACC eat PRET 3p-GEN	Inchoative	I was starting to eat it.
U angaxa ir ingi.	1p eat-CESS PAST 3p-ACC	Cessative	I finished eating it.
U angarmu ir ingi.	1p eat-HABI PAST 3p-ACC	Habitual	I used to eat it.
U angare ir ingi.	1p eat-PERF PAST 3p-ACC	Perfective	I ate it.