Askathal Language

Askathal (/ɘǀt͡ʃʼːʜɔːɺ/) is a highland language associated with the cold upland interior, distinguished by a compact but highly marked phonology and a strongly structured grammatical profile. It has a predominantly (C)(C)V(C) rhythm with predictable penultimate stress, a mid-heavy vowel system /e ø ɘ ɵ ɤ o ɛ ɔ/ with phonemic length, and a consonant inventory centered on the dental click /ǀ/, the nasal dental click /ŋ͡ǀ/, the voiceless epiglottal fricative /ʜ/, and the alveolar lateral flap /ɺ/; its ejectives /tʼ kʼ qʼ t͡sʼ t͡ʃʼ t͡ɬʼ/ are restricted to positions directly adjacent to /ǀ/. Morphosyntactically, Askathal is mildly agglutinative and predominantly suffixing and cliticising, with basic head-final clause structure, postpositions, singulative and collective number marking instead of a simple plural, ecological classifier contrasts in deixis, proximate-obviative third-person reference, and a TAM system built around aspectual clitics and edge-reduplication.