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Aprosian People's Democratic Union
S E V E R I Ó K

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L I B E R T Y,—U N I T Y,—S O C I A L I S M!
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Severiók, also referred to by its translated name Common Speech or Common Aprosian, is the official language of the Aprosian People’s Democratic Union. It is the most widely spoken Aprosiatic language, with over 36 million total speakers inside Aprosia and several thousand more outside in the Aprosian diaspora.

Historically, Severiók is a mixed language between the now extinct Múzan language and several other Aprosiatic languages and is now a part of the Múzangetic sub-branch of the wider Aprosiatic languages. It was formed with the intention of creating a unifying language for the new unified state, without giving any individual ethnic group a superior position by granting their ethnic language the position of an official language. Severiók was created over the span of decades from the 19th century to the 20th century through poetry and literature, alongside nationalistic linguistic pushes.

By law, Severiók is the official language in both federal and local affairs. Official documents and road signs are all written in Severiók alongside the local official languages. Severiók also maintains supremacy in the media and education, with the majority of media and educational institutes employing Severiók as their language of use.

Despite its status as the official language, most Aprosians reportedly tend to use their own vernacular languages as their means of communication unless conversing with members of other ethnicities. Even then, Severiók has through the decades been divided into a formal written language and a dialectical spoken language used in unofficial matters.

Phonology

Severiók has 19 consonant phonemes and 14 vowel phonemes, with the vowels maintaining both long and short variants and consonants having either palatalised or aspirated forms, two consonants having both forms alongside the base form. Both palatalisation and aspiration are based on the length of the succeeding vowel and with the consonants ‘k’ and ‘t’, is based on the situation of the consonant or the vowel succeeding it. Severiók consonants maintain consonant length and can occur as geminates.

The 14 vowel phonemes maintain a system of vowel length, with the short and long vowels treated as their own phonemes. Vowel length or stress is an important part of the language and is used to bring meaning. The location of stress within the the word can alter depending on grammatical inflection. While the most common word roots and words themselves maintain a single pressurised vowel, the stress in grammatical endings is commonly preserved to differentiate the ending from other endings. Some compound words may also preserve the stress of both of the root words.

Consonants

Vowels

It should be noted that while the latinisation of Severiók and both the literary and spoken forms when spoken distuinguish short and long vowels, the Aprosian Arabic script used officially for the language does not distuingish them as separate letters. Instead, those familiar with the language recognize the short and long vowels from the text through context.

Grammar

Severiók is a heavily inflected language. Nouns and adjectives are inflected by case, number and definiteness; pronouns through cases and verbs through tense, voice, aspect, mood, person and number. Inflection is shown through modifying the root word or adding suffixes at the end of the root word. While a SVO language officially, the inflection in Severiók allows for flexible alteration of the word order.

Nouns

Severiók nouns are inflicted by case, number and definiteness. The language has 9 noun cases, divided into 3 forms based on number and definiteness. The language has both indefinite and definite nouns, with definiteness in singular shown by articles inflicted alongside the definite singular noun. In plural, the Severiók nouns maintain both definite and indefinite forms, displayed through altering the root word and the case inflection of the word.

The demonstrative words ‘that’ (méd) and ‘this’ (máš) have historically developed into articles for the singular nouns. The demonstrative word used as an article is inflected alongside the noun and the descriptive adjective of the noun.

The primary inflection of nouns in Severiók is done through the 9 noun cases, which bring additional meaning to the noun through suffixes. Number and definiteness are shown through the noun inflection by modifying the root word and then adding the grammatical suffix after the either modified or unmodified rootword. Most suffixes can be directly compared to English prefixes.

Pronouns

Severiók pronouns are conjugated in all of the noun cases except the distributive case. In these cases, the pronouns work relatively similarly to Indo-European languages and other regional languages.

Adjectives

Adjectives in literary Severiók follow the noun and are by default conjugated in the instrumental case, with the noun being conjugated by default in the accusative case, an archaic remainder of the Múzan language. The adjectives further follow the case of the noun and the number, singular and plural without distinction on the definitiness of the noun. The adjectives have three separate degrees; positive, comparative and superlative.

Note that while in English the superlative is always definitive, Severiók allows the superlative adjective and its noun to be indefinite when, for example, other aspects of the noun are not known or when the noun has not been physically found.

As previously mentioned, the system of adjectives in literary Severiók is largely an archaic system not found in other contemporary Aprosian languages, where the adjective always precedes the noun without any default conjugation in nominative. The influence of the contemporary spoken Aprosian languages has also influenced spoken Severiók to not primarily use the literary form of adjectives.

Verbs

Severiók can express different combinations of tense, voice, aspect and mood, alongside the person of the verb through the usage of verbal morphology, varying suffixes or prefixes or through auxiliary verbs, often using other formal verbs to fill the position of the auxiliary verb. The auxiliary verbs or further agglutination of the verb encode various shades of meaning of how the action is carried out and also interact with the lexical semantics of the root verb.

Person

Tense

Voice

Severiók uses two voices in verbal conjugation; active and passive, represented by the suffix -da. The passive acts similarly to a person based conjugation and the passive suffix often takes the place of the person based suffix of the verb. Grammatical role of the object in the sentence remains unaltered with the passive, thus transitivity can be used. In this, the passive verb takes the role of the transitive verb, but the same verb conjugated in the third singular may imply anticausativity.

Examples of voice

• Míndare žánut álzudin
→ I like to eat apples (active)

• Tózadura sádudra žánuda álzudin
→ In many countries, apples are eaten (passive)

Examples of mood

• Alí žánuretan há kán dá édžes.
→ Ali will eat if he is hungry (subjunctive)

• Alí žánurezí há kán dází édžes.
→ Ali would eat if he would be hungry (conditional)

• Žánutčá!
→ Eat! (imperative)

Examples of aspect

• Čiáre
→ I am doing (something). (imperfective)

• Dočiáre
→ I am doing (something until it is done). (perfective)

Negation

To achieve negation, the prefix ‘ze-’ is added to the negated word, commonly a verb, but can be added in front of a noun or an adjective in certain cases. A negated noun or adjective is most commonly used in questions and in the spoken language, the opposite of certain adjectives can be said using the base adjective and adding the negative prefix to the adjective.

Questions

The word order in questions remains largely unaltered, with the questioning word acting as a subject in the sentence. A separate suffix may be used to form a question from a sentence or to bring further emphasis on the questioning word.

Orthography

Severiók, like all other contemporary Aprosian languages, is written using the Aprosian Perso-Arabic script, based on the Persian script, ultimately tracing its origins to the Arabic script used to write the Arabic language. Shia Muslim influences and Islamication of the country, starting in the 14th century, and eventual rule brought the Persian script to Aprosia in the early XXth century and eventually ecplised the XXXXX script as the style of writing for the arts, administration. After the period of islamisation of the society, the Persian script was modified to suit the Aprosian languages in an improved manner, such as turning away from the abjad style of writing to a system closer to an alphabet, and the Nastaʿlīq style of calligraphy was adopted. Nastaʿlīq is the primary style of writing Severiók, with a majority of media, culture, official papers etc. being written using the calligraphic style.

Unlike the Persian script, the Aprosian script writes short vowels but does not distuinguish them from the long vowels; the reader has to know the stress of the word from context. As such, most of the harakat diacritics used to write short vowels in the Persian script are not largely used in Aprosia. In colloquial writing or with students learning the language, the harakat may be used to distuinguish the long vowels from short vowels.

While not used officially in Aprosia, transliteration of the language from the Aprosian Perso-Arabic script to the Latin alphabet is done under the General Language Transcription system developed by the Noronican colonial administration during the 1800s, later reformed to match the pronounciation and native spelling more accurately. Transliteration of Severiók is done often for those not literate in the Perso-Arabic script or beginner learners of the language. The GLT is used for transliterating all other Aprosian languages as well.

Example and Basic Vocabulary