Old Avian

Old Avian is a language spoken by Aarakocra and Kenku, two fictional bird-like D&D races. I made this language for a D&D campaign with my friends.

Phonology

The phonemes of Old Avian can be divied into three classes: consonants, vowels, and whistled consonants. Any blank areas in the tables indicate a sound that is not present in Old Avian.

Consonants

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar	Palatal	Uvular	Glottal
Plosive		t		c	q	ʔ
Fricative	ɸ	s			χ
Whistled Fricative	ɸ͎	s͎	x͎ʷ

Vowels

	Front	Back
Open-mid		ʌ
Near-Open	æ
Open		ɑ

Additionally, vowels and whistled consonants can be glottalized ( /ˀ/ ). This is usually realized as creaky voice [◌̰] in vowels, but in whistled consonants it is realized as breathy voice ( [ʱ] ).

Tonemes

Old Avian has two phonemic tones: high ( /ɑ́/ ) and low ( /ɑ̀/ ). Tones are only applied to vowels and whistled consonants.

Orthography

IPA	Romanization
/t/	T t
/c/	Q q
/q/	Q̇ q̇
/ʔ/	Ɂ ɂ
/ɸ/	F f
/s/	S s
/χ/	X x
/ɸ͎/	F̃ f̃
/s͎/	S̃ s̃
/x͎ʷ/	X̃ x̃
/ɑ/	A a
/ʌ/	Â â
/æ/	Æ æ
/ˀ/	ұ

Syllable Structure

Old Avian syllables have a fundamental structure of (C)V,W(ˀ)(V,W)(C), where C represents any non-whistled consonant, W represents a whistled consonant, and V represents a vowel.

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