Ahōtoli

Ahōtoli, or Ahōtolĭ, called Azódori in Xiri, was a language originating on the large southern island of Udovuʼo, called Azódo in Xiri and Ahōto in Ahōtoli, and is a sister language to Xiri. It took over as the lingua franca of Udovuʼo after the Xiyeru exodus to T'ugü at the end of the 7th century, and was the most commonly spoken language in Udovuʼo as of 800 AGS.

Lack of labial consonants
Ahōtoli exhibits the labialised velar consonants /kʷ w/, but a complete lack of pure labial consonant phonemes, an extremely uncommon feature cross-linguistically. The postulated sound changes which deleted all of Proto-Xiri's labial consonants *m, *p and *f are listed below:


 * m p f → n t s / _i
 * p → f → h / #_
 * f → w / V_V
 * m p f → n kʷ ∅

All dialects of Udovuʼo experienced centuries of influence from standard Xiri, which directed them along convergent evolutionary paths, but Ahōtoli appears to have resisted the adoption of bilabial consonants due to conscious social factors. Culture in Azodo had historically been more isolationist than the other islands, and when Xiri first began to spread to Azodo, children were often discouraged from speaking with labial consonants outside of specific situations which required the use of the Xiri language. Xiri's most common consonant /f/ was considered particularly obnoxious to many people, perhaps owing to its abundant use as a grammatical prefix on verbs which was not present in Ahōtoli. The Weweneʼă "cultivation of proper speech", a 5th century Ahōtoli text outlining the differences between the language and standard Xiri, calls the f- glyphs of the Ugugo script "as pointless as they are loathsome", and describes Xiri's /f/ as "a wholly useless sound which may carry no meaning, and whose use signifies witlessness and a lack of self-cognisance".

After Ahōtoli was popularised throughout the other islands in the 8th and 9th centuries AGS, labial consonants became associated with "improper" dialects, and even became somewhat taboo in some more formal contexts. Despite this, [m] was not uncommon to hear among the speech of even the most well-spoken individuals as a realisation of utterance-initial /w/, or for some speakers in free variation with /ŋ/ before close back vowels (ŭ u ū).

Vowels
The extra short vowels (ĭ ă ŭ) are never stressed and typically realised with slightly centralised vowel qualities [ɪ ɐ ʊ], while the long vowels (ē ō ī ū) sometimes have a slight degree of diphthongisation for some speakers [ɛːɐ̯ ɔːɐ̯ iːɘ̯ uːɘ̯]. The reason for analysing the extra short vowels as a separate vowel length rather than simply short vowels /ɪ ɐ ʊ/ of a different quality is related to the distribution and alternation between the different vowel lengths, as well the fact that Ahōtoli can be analysed as a mora-timed language, where the three vowel lengths have one, two and three morae.

Stress
Stress falls on the first short or long syllable, never on an extra short syllable. There exist many pairs of words contrasted by stress and the distinction between the extra short and short vowel length:


 * hańă [ˈhaŋɐ̆] "Bigmoon, night" ~ hăńa [hɐ̆ˈŋa] "nose, protrusion"
 * yakĭ [ˈjakɪ̆] "smart, witty" ~ yăki [jɐ̆ˈki] "now"
 * uxĭ [ˈuʃɪ̆] "these (things)" ~ ŭxi [ʊ̆ˈʃi] "east"