Enqutsi language

Énqutsa is a language spoken by the Énqutsa people and others of coastal regions south of the Vinca canal in Énqusqó, a peninsula in south Vidina. Linguistically, Énqutsa is a south Énqutsa language of which there are five extant languages spoken across Énqusqó. It is part of the wider Kidal-Énqutsa language family.

Older forms of the language were used as a lingua franca across the Kidal and the coastal communities of south Vidina and north Tiridinia for a span of 700 years, only being displaced by the rise of the Empire of Tar-dinuu and subsequent Alutran colonialism.

Classification
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History
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Classical Énqutsa
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High Énqutsa
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Modern Énqutsa
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Geographic distribution
The region where Énqutsa is spoken has varied in size over the centuries. The early boundaries of this region before the interregnum are unknown due to poor textual and archeological evidence.

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Dialects
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Pluricentric regulation
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Phonology
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Consonants
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Vowels
The Énqutsa language features five vowels: /a/, /ɛ/, /i/, /ɔ/ and /u/. Vowels must take one of four tones: high, low, rising and falling. These vowels have a phonemic contrast with nasal counterparts bringing the total number of phonemic vowels up to 40.

The rising and falling tones are combined with greater length and the falling and low tones also are realised with creaky voice. In some dialects, particularly the north-eastern dialect, and generally amongst younger speakers, tone has largely disappeared and been replaced with phonemic length and creaky voicing distinctions.

Phonotactics
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Prosody
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Regional variation
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Grammar
Énqutsa is a nominative-accusative language. The subject of both transitive and intransitive phrases is in the nominative case, which is unmarked.

Basic syntactic construction in Énqutsa is subject-object-verb. The order of phrases within a sentence can be changed, however, for thematic purposes. Words within a phrase must follow specific a specific order and cannot be rearranged. It is perhaps more accurate to describe Énqutsa word order as topic-comment. This means that in neutral sentences that merely convey information, the topic must always be stated before a comment with a verbal construction coming in final position. This is occasionally obfuscated by pronoun dropping as no nominative forms of the pronouns exist.

Verbs
The auxiliary verb, which accompanies most verbs, must agree with the subject in both person and number. Énqutsa is unique amongst Kidal languages as it no longer marks for obviation. The nominative-accusative alignment, which is typical of south Énqusqan languages, is also rare amongst the wider language family.

Modern Énqutsa allows for the conjugation of four verbs, although there is a greater number that are conjugated in literary contexts. These verbs are called synthetic verbs. The synthetic verbs can conjugate for aspect (perfective or imperfective) according to person, animacy and number.

The remaining verbs in Énqutsa are known as defective or periphrastic, behaving similarly to participles. There are several forms that these verbs take according to aspect, mood and negation. There are also periphrastic forms of the synthetic verbs which are used to express specific tense or mood paradigms.

Within a verb phrase, the periphrastic verb proceeds the auxiliary, which handles agreement.

Nouns
An Énqutsa noun can decline by 17 forms according to case and number. Énqutsa mass nouns exhibit inverse number, wherein the standard plural morphology behaves as a singulative. Mass nouns are usually inanimate, however, body parts that come in pairs are almost always mass nouns. Due to this, number in Énqutsa nouns is often described as inherent and atypical instead of singular and plural. Énqutsa nouns also have animacy, divided into three levels: human, animate and inanimate. The three main declension groups (groups of nouns with similar patterns of declension) are subdivided into variations due to slight morphological differences in the stems of nouns of different animacy.

Pronouns
Very few of the pronouns can exist independently in Énqutsa and are often only able to exist as suffixes. All nominative pronouns behave like this and act as pseudo-genitive suffixes in possessive constructions.

Adjectives
Adjectives must agree with their head in animacy. This is achieved through suffixation of the nominative 3rd person pronouns to the bare stem of the adjective.

Writing system
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