Weian Language

**Weian** (魏語, *Wèi yǔ*) is a language spoken across Munao and western Tōkai. It is a member of the Weian language family, and is believed to have origins in various offshoots of ancient Munaoan. Weian characters (魏字, *Wèi zì*) are utilized in several other languages, most notable of which is Shingōan. Weian is formally recognized as a minority language in Angelica, Shingō, and Tsukimoto.

## Phonology

The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant, or consonant+glide; zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in North-Munao Weian, where the nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable.

In Standard Weian much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, the retroflex approximant /ɻ /, and voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Weian, are limited to only /n/, /ŋ/ and /ɻ /.

### Tones

All varieties of spoken Weian use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of southern Munao may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in northern Munao have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts.

A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Weian is the application of the four tones of Standard Weian (along with the neutral tone) to the syllable *ma*. The tones are exemplified by the following five Weian words:

#### Examples of Standard Weian tones:

 麻
 马/馬
 骂/罵
 吗/嗎

## Grammar

Weian is often described as a "monosyllabic" language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Classical Weian and Middle Weian; in Classical Weian, for example, perhaps 90% of words correspond to a single syllable and a single character. In the modern varieties, it is usually the case that a morpheme (unit of meaning) is a single syllable.

Some of the conservative northern varieties of modern Weian have largely monosyllabic words, especially among the more basic vocabulary. In modern Weian, however, most nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonological attrition. Sound change over time has steadily reduced the number of possible syllables. In modern Weian, there are now only about 1,200 possible syllables, including tonal distinctions.

Weian morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction. Although many of these single-syllable morphemes (*zì*, 字) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as *cí* (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Weian *cí* ('word') can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.

For example:

* *yún* 云/雲 'cloud'
* *hànbǎobāo*, *hànbǎo* 汉堡包/漢堡包, 汉堡/漢堡 'hamburger'
* *wǒ* 我 'I, me'
* *rén* 人 'people, human, mankind'
* *dìqiú* 地球 'The Earth'
* *shǎndiàn* 闪电/閃電 'lightning'
* *mèng* 梦/夢 'dream'

All varieties of modern Weian are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology—i.e., changes in form of a word—to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Weian has very few grammatical inflections—it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles.

They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Standard Weian, this involves the use of particles like *le* 了 (perfective), *hái* 还/還 ('still'), *yǐjīng* 已经/已經 ('already'), and so on.

Weian has a subject–verb–object word order, and makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Weian also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with languages like Shingōan and Tsukimotoan. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Weian include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping and the related subject dropping.

## Vocabulary

The entire Weian character corpus comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Weian media and daily conversation. However Weian characters should not be confused with Weian words. Because most Weian words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Weian words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for a Weian character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Weian language.