Halfling language

"Halfling language" is the term for the largely-mutually-intelligible dialects of the Forest Halflings of The Green Maw. It is an agglutinative language family, meaning words are made up of roots and affixes. The detailed attention that Halfling culture gives to both social gender and to time is built directly into its language.

Phonology & Phonotactics

With eleven vowels and seventeen consonants, Halfling has an unusually high vowel-to-consonant ratio, reflecting its now-extinct tonal history. Halfling phonology is also notable for its complete lack of of the voiceless bilabial plosive /p/. Affricates (consonants that begin as a plosive and release as a fricative) are also absent, but plosives and fricatives are present.

Consonants

	Labial	Labio-Dental	Dental	Retroflex	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m		n
Plosive	b				t d		k g	ʔ
Affricate
Tap			r
Fricative		f v	θ		s z			h
Approximant					l		w

The anglicized written consonants are:

B b

D d

F f

G g

H h

K k

L l

M m

N n

R r

S s

T t

Th th /θ/

V v

W w

Z z

' /ʔ/

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Near Close	ɪ		ʊ
Close-Mid	e		o
Mid		ə
Open-Mid	ɛ		ɔ
Open	æ	ä

Halfling vowels are anglicized as follows:

A a /ä/

Æ æ

E e /ɛ/

Eo eo /ʊ/

Ey ey /e/

I i

O o /ɔ/

Oh oh /o/

U u

Uh uh /ə/

Y y /ɪ/

• /ä/ or A is pronounced like the "a" in "bra"
• /æ/ or Æ is pronounced like the "a" in "cat"
• /ɛ/ or E is pronounced like the "e" in "wet"
• /ʊ/ or Eo is pronounced like the "oo" in "hook"
• /e/ or Ey is pronounced like "a" in "mage" but cut off
• /i/ or I is pronounced like "ee" in "street"
• /ɔ/ or O is pronounced like "o" in "not"
• /o/ or Oh is pronounced like "o" in "smote" but cut off
• /u/ or U is pronounced like "u" in "chute"
• /ə/ or Uh is prounced like "u" in "cut"
• /ɪ/ or Y is pronounced like "i" in "bit"

Pronunciation Notes & Dialectal Differences

• Halfling does not have phonological vowel length, but speakers can lengthen a vowel in the first syllable to emphasize a word.
• /r/ is often pronounced partially devoiced and may be a tap between vowels.
• /ʔ/ is inserted before vowel-initial syllables within words.
• "A" becomes "æ" when it directly precedes final syllable "r," so /ær/.
• /ŋ/ or "ng" does not exist in Halfling. When words with this sound enter the Halfling language, they are pronounced /n/ and the "g" is dropped.
• Some regional varieties glottalize /t/ when followed by /r/.
• Some regional varieties articulate /n/ before /i/ as a palatal nasal [ɲ] at syllable boundaries.
• Some regional varieties pronounce /s/ and /z/ as /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ before consonants.

Syllables

Syllable types in order of frequency with canon examples. C means consonant and V means vowel. CC means two consonants following each other, i.e. a "consonant cluster."

• CV (ro, re, ma, ha, ku, ta, ka, be, no, ni)
• CVC (ther, zun, cal, len, bor)
• CCV (gwe, dra, fli, sla, sve)
• CVCC (verd, zant, gorm)
• VC (in, ar, if)
• CCVC (tris, bryn)
• V (a, i)

It is taboo to refer to a halfling doing something out of their gender proscribed time. If you want to refer to a halfling doing something out of their gender defined time, you must leave them unnamed while connecting them to a different halfling of the appropriate gender associated time. For example, if you want to talk about a Chaosgrown named Charleynee doing something in the past you would have to reference their Dragongrown friend Zenithdra, saying, "The friend of Zenithdra who likes to eat grubs did that yesterday."

Possession is expressed using the construction "_____of _____" as with the Spanish "de" or Japanese "no." There is a single plural pronoun for a group of halflings, they/them. the pronoun thee/theeir is used when the gender of the subject is unknown (be it because they are a child and their gender has not been assigned yet, because they are an outsider who's gender doesn't map easily onto halfling gender conceptions, or some other reason).

Halfling pronouns are incorporated as a syllable of their names, frequently suffixes at the end of their name.