The following is a description of the Berlean southern vernacular as it is spoken in the capital and second most populated city, Mlhernip. It is described below through comparison with the standard language. The standard language is primarily based off of northern dialects and vernacular, which tend to be more archaic and lack tones. This is due to the capital of Berlean historically being located in the north, what is now the city of Neamor, before its eventual relocation to the south due to the increasing possibility of an invasion by the Stallion Empire from the mainland. The northern vernacular and southern vernacular seem to have diverged towards the end of the Old Berlean period, and as such, can be strikingly different and speakers may have difficulty understanding each other without prior exposure to the other dialect.

Berlean southern vernacular is characterized by a simplified, coda-less syllable structure of C(L)(H)V, a smaller consonant inventory, both of which developed alongside tonogenisis resulting in four lexical tones, and nasal vowels. The overall grammar is also slightly different from that of the standard language, notably the case marking system.

---

---

Phonology

---

Historical Development

• Historical coronals /t/, /d/ and /n/ all merged with the dorsals.
• Historical /g/ and /ŋ/ never merged as they did in the north.
• Historical /tʰ~θ/ became /s/ when followed by medial /j/, /f/ when followed by medial /w/, and /x/ when followed by no medial.
• All historical coda plosives became glottal stops or glottalized phonation, but may still reappear in compounds through resyllabification when the following syllable or word begins with a vowel.
• Historical coda /l/ vocalized and caused preceding vowels to labialize; /a(l)/ and /wa(l)/ surface as [uo] and /ja(l)/ surfaces as [yø].
• Historical coda labials also caused labialization of the preceding vowel.
• All historical coda nasals nasalized the preceding vowel and were dropped, but may still reappear in compounds through resyllabification.
• Voicing distinction disappeared resulting in tones: voiceless onsets resulted in a high tone while voiced onsets resulted in a low tone. These combine with whether the syllable was open or closed, resulting in the four tones present in southern vernacular.

---

Consonant Phonemes

	Labial	Coronal	Dorsal
Nasal	m		ŋ
Stop	p		k
Fricative	f	s	x
Liquid		l

• Dorsals have allophones depending on the medial or vowel that follows: a non-rhotic vowel makes the dorsal uvular, a rhotic-vowel or labial medial makes the dorsal velar, and a palatal medial makes the dorsal palatal.
• Intervocalic voicing occurs for all obstruents except for /s/ which sometimes does not undergo voicing due to historical reasons.

---

Vowel Phonemes

		Plain	Rhotic
Monophthong	Plain	a	ɚ
	Nasal	ã	ɚ̃
Diphthong	Plain	aɚ̯
	Nasal	ãɚ̯

---

Vowel Allophones

		Medial
		/j/	/w/	/ɥ/
Nucleus	/a/	[je]	[wo]	[ɥø]
	/ɚ/	[jɚ~jɪɚ̯]	[wɚ~wʊɚ̯]	[ɥɚ~ɥʏɚ̯]

---

Tones

	Open Syllable	Checked Syllable
Voiceless Onset	high falling long, breathy pie → [pje˥˧]	high rising short, glottalized piek → [pje˦˥(ʔ)]
Voiced Onset	low falling long, creaky bie →[pje˨˩ˀ]	low rising short, creaky, glottalized biek → [pje˩˧ˀ(ʔ)]

---

---

Grammar

---

Basic Word Order

Perhaps the most striking difference between colloquial Berlean and standard Berlean is the lack of case markers and its basic sentence structure. Instead of using case markers like the standard language, colloquial Berlean duplicates the verb whenever there is more than one argument present. If the verb has only one argument, then the word order is SV. If there are two arguments, then the verb is duplicated and the resulting word order is VSVO. Look at the following examples and comparisons with the standard language:

The negation prefix is only attached to the first verb. For modal verbs, on the other hand, it depends on the type modal as to whether it is placed in front of the first iteration of the main, lexical verb or if the modal itself is repeated as the main verb.

Instead of the locative case marker present in the standard language, the southern vernacular uses the verb niẽ (equivalent to niem) in locative constructions.