Araçanic

Araçanic
Official status
Spoken in	Araçana
Speaker
Endonym	zeha Zana /s̪e.ha s̪a.na/
Technical information

Araçanic is a language 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/