Boteyese
 | This article is private. The author requests that you do not make changes to this project without approval. By all means, please help fix spelling, grammar and organisation problems, thank you. |
| Boteyese | |
|---|---|
| botajkly | |
 Flag of the Republic of the Boteys | |
| Pronunciation | [ˈbotɐjklɨ] |
| Created by | Foreseen |
| Setting | Alternative history Europe, Southern Baltic Sea |
| Native to | the Boteys |
| Ethnicity | Boteyese |
| Native speakers | ≈360,400 (2024) |
language isolate
| |
Early forms | Proto-Boteyese
|
Standard form | Standard Boteyese (based on Kodenburg Skaheyese)
|
Dialects |
|
| Official status | |
| Regulated by | Boteyese Language Committee / Botjar çOpst aRoyjt |
 Map of the Boteys, where Boteyese is spoken | |
Boteyese (/ˌboʊteɪˈiːz, ˌboʊ-/ BOW-tay-EASE; endonym: botajkly [ˈbotɐjklɨ], botjar çopst [ˈbotjɐr ˈʃopst], or rarely botajsky [ˈbotɐjskɨ]) is a language isolate spoken as a first language by about 360,400 Boteyese of whom 35,700 reside outside of the Boteys, mainly in Germany and Russia. Alongside Basque, it is one of the two known language isolates in Europe.
Owing to facts of Boteyese geography, history, and culture, the language is considered to feature many distinct regional varieties, not all of which are mutually intelligible. As of the mid-20th century however, the traditional dialect areas have been in steep decline, with some already being effectively moribund or extinct. The profound dialect levelling taking place has been variously attributed to the events of World War II, urbanization, changes in societal attitudes, and the continued prevalence of the standard language.
Boteyese features agglutinative and fusional elements and is of mixed head directionality. Its phonology and nominal morphology show close typological convergence with surrounding Indo-European languages, particularly North Germanic, though featuring no system of grammatical gender. Verbs are conjugated for subject and object, definiteness of arguments, tense/mood, voice, and aspect, and can take several nonfinite forms. Basic word order is verb-final, topic–comment, though information structure and situational syntactic constraints lead to some variation.
Etymology
The archipelago's endonym Botjar and the English exonym (the) Boteys both ultimately derive from Old Norse Bóteyjar, a compound of Old Norse bót (“bight, cove”) and Old Norse eyjar (“islands”). The Norse plural was not adapted into English, thus the name takes the English plural instead; cf. Orkney a.k.a. the Orkneys. It has been suggested that the conspicuous absence of a single native word referring to the entire people prior to the arrival of Norse settlement could be indicative of a fractious social order and/or lack of shared cultural consciousness.
The language names derive from the Old Norse lemma also. The modern term botajkly is the participle form of the verb botajky “to speak Boteyese”, while its archaic equivalent botajsky is derived with the suffix -sky (Old Boteyese -sku), used to form language names. The archaic suffix is of uncertain origin, but it is presumably the result of mixed influences from the dative singular form of early Modern Swedish language names (such as in the Gustav Vasa Bible e.g. på swensko) and continental Slavic i.e. Old Polish -ski.
History
Phonology
Orthography
Boteyese is written in the Latin script with some additional characters formed with diacritics, comprising 23 letters in total. The modern orthography, based on the standard language, is completely phonemic with a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, though the pronunciation of some characters varies with respect to dialect and regular allophony.
In addition to the standard set, there are a few letters which have conventionalized names and pronunciations. The letters ⟨q⟩, ⟨w⟩, ⟨x⟩, and ⟨z⟩ are used mainly in the archaic spellings of personal names, toponyms, and non-incorporated loanwords, while ⟨ž⟩ is mainly used for modern loanwords and transliterations from Russian and other Balto-Slavic languages, thus Leonid Brezhnev is adapted as Lyjanit Brežnyf.
The letters ⟨ç⟩ and ⟨ş⟩ are historically modified versions of the diagraphs ⟨cs⟩ and ⟨ts⟩. As such, they are formally considered to be separate characters and not diacritic character combinations. Nowadays, the original digraphs have seen use in stylistic spelling meant to evoke the late medieval or early modern period even in contexts where this is anachronistic, such as spelling fçe “year” as ⟨fcse⟩ despite the fact that it would have been spelt ⟨fzē⟩ at the time.
In Boteyese orthography, the aprostrophe is used to mark contraction, as in many other languages. This most often applies to cliticizing words, such as the subordinator at (t'=), the expletive article ret (='t), or the adverbial negator aky (k'=).
| Grapheme | Name | Phoneme |
|---|---|---|
| A, a | a [ˈɑ] | /ɐ/ |
| B, b | be [ˈbe] | /b/ |
| C, c | ce [ˈt͡ʃe] | /t͡ʃ/ |
| D, d | de [ˈde] | /d/ |
| E, e | e [ˈe] | /e/ |
| F, f | af [ˈɑf] | /f/ |
| G, g | ge [ˈɣe] | /ɣ/ |
| H, h | ho [ˈho] | /h |
| I, i | i [ˈi] | /i/ |
| J, j | ji [ˈji] | /j/ |
| L, l | al [ˈɑl] | /l/ |
| M, m | am [ˈɑm] | /m/ |
| N, n | an [ˈɑn] | /n/ |
| O, o | o [ˈo] | /o/ |
| P, p | pe [ˈpe] | /p/ |
| R, r | ar [ˈɑr] | /r/ |
| S, s | as [ˈɑs] | /s/ |
| T, t | te [ˈte] | /t/ |
| U, u | u [ˈu] | /u/ |
| V, v | ve [ˈve] | /v/ |
| Y, y | y [ˈɪ] | /ɨ/ |
| Ç, ç | çe [ˈʃe] | /ʃ/ |
| Ş, ş | şe [ˈθ̠̞e] | /θ/ |
| Grapheme | Name | Phoneme |
|---|---|---|
| Q, q | ku [ˈku] | /k/ |
| W, W | dybal ve [ˈdɪbɐl ˈve] | /v/ |
| X, x | ex [ˈes] | /s/ |
| Z, z | zeta [ˈʃetɐ] | /ʃ/ |
| Ž, ž | zeta oço't vli [ˈʃetɐ ˈoʃ.ot ˈvli] | /ʒ/ |