Xiri

Xiri is the language spoken on Udovuʼo's central island, and was the most spoken languages throughout the islands until around 800 AGS. The term Xiri is sometimes applied to all the native languages of Udovuʼo considered as a group, though the many language varieties are often not mutually intelligible and should be considered separate languages.

History
Xiri represents one branch of a small family of languages descended from the Proto-Xiric language, making it a sister language to the other languages of Udovuʼo. The history of Xiri as a distinctly separate language begins some time after 300 BGS and extends throughout the first millennium AGS. Various changes to the language occurred throughout this time, many of which were due to influence from Alöbi. Xiri is typically considered in two major historical stages: Early and Late Xiri, with the historical dialect Exodus Xiri also regarded an important variant.

Early Xiri
The earliest stage of the language which is distinct from its sister languages, spoken from c. 300 BGS until around 100-300 AGS. Canonical Early Xiri is often taken as the state of the language immediately before the first contact with the Alöbi-speaking Öb people, which occurred in the first century AGS.

Late Xiri
After first contact with T'ugü, Xiri underwent some changes which were partially influenced by continued contact throughout most of the Horizon period. The variety of Xiri spoken during this stage of history, primarily 300 - 700 AGS, is Middle Xiri.

Exodus Xiri
Exodus Xiri was a divergent Late Xiri dialect, the particular variant of Xiri spoken by Xiyeru refugees arriving in T'ugü after the Great Sickness in 655 AGS and subsequently throughout the Exodus Period. This stage of the language was strongly influenced by Alöbi and had already begun mixing into what would later become Möxale. Exodus Xiri may have been distinct enough from the contemporary Xiri still spoken in Udovuʼo to consider it a distinct language, and may instead be thought of as a very early stage of Möxale before it had fully matured.

Consonants

 * /n/ and /t/ are dental [n̪] and [t̪ (d̪)] respectively.
 * Medial glides are not pronounced as separate consonants, but expressed as labialisation or palatalisation of the preceding consonant, e.g. kwi [kʷi] "yam".
 * /p t tʃ k f s ʃ ɹ/ are allophonically shifted to [b d dʒ g v z ʒ ɾ] intervocalically.
 * The voiced allophones are distinguished in romanisation, ⟨p t c k f s x rh⟩ vs. ⟨b d j g v z ž r⟩, but not in the native orthography.
 * When underlying /k/ is voiced to [ŋ] and thus neutralised with /ŋ/, it is still written as ⟨K⟩ in the native orthography and romanised as ⟨g⟩ to reflect this. Some lexical items have fossilised /k/ [ŋ] still spelt as though it were /k/, e.g. saga [saŋa] "foreigner", from older *saka.
 * Medial glides blocked this voicing, e.g. pwa [pʷa] "island" → upwa [upʷa] "islands", not **ubwa.

Vowels
Vowel length was contrastive on all five vowels in Early Xiri:


 * ka "breeze" / kā "wood"
 * e "from, by" / ē "and, then, thus"
 * iji "pig" / īji "black, dark"
 * so "fruit" / sō "blue, green"
 * fu "there, that" / fū "but, except"

Syllable structure
The syllable onset could take a single consonant, with some initials allowing a medial glide /j/ or /w/.

Eight consonants could appear in coda position: /m n ŋ f s h j w/. The glides /j w/ could only occur as coda following /e a/, yielding the combinations /ej ew aj aw/, with the vowel pronounced long and the sequences acting as single bimoraic vowels, often transcribed [ei̯ eu̯ ai̯ eu̯]. Coda nasals were only expressed as consonants if a following word began with a vowel, otherwise they were elided and pronounced as nasalisation of the preceding vowel.

Consonants were never geminated, if a coda came into contact with an identical onset, they were merged into a single consonant, e.g. /teːf/ tēf "bone" + /fes/ fes "river fish" → /teːfes/ tēves "fish sp.".

Some examples of all possible syllable shapes are shown in the table below:

Stress
The standard dialect has a fairly regular stress pattern in which disyllabic words containing place the stress on the second syllable, while longer words stress the second syllable. Monosyllables may be stressed or unstressed depending on the word and its use within the discourse, grammatical particles are usually unstressed. Every second syllable after the main stressed syllable also receives a weaker secondary stress. Inflectional suffixes such as the accusative -yo also affect the stress. Some examples are shown in the table below.

Active sound changes in Early Xiri
These sound changes occurred later in history, changing vocab diachronically and remaining active throughout the Early Xiri period, with newly coined words also exhibiting the changes. This means that an Early Xiri word which had historically undergone alveolar palatalisation, like *nyēre > ñēre, can still undergo glide metathesis: saw-ñēre > sañwēre.