Tsang'hi Language

Tsang’hi (/t͡saŋ.ʔi/ or /t͡saŋ.hi/, depending on register) is the sole surviving Oayi language of the wider Oayi-Naiŋxic family, representing a long-isolated peripheral branch rather than a member of the central Naikaumi continuum. It is a tonal language built around short, consonant-heavy lexical bases, most of them monosyllabic, with root shapes commonly of the types VC, CVC, CVCC, and CCVCCC. Tone is lexically contrastive and morphologically active, interacting with vowel harmony, consonant harmony, and mutation processes that may carry derived forms some distance from their base shapes. Word-final vowels are characteristically avoided, and final nasals frequently release into whistled off-glides, with /ŋ/, /n/, and /m/ each showing distinct whistle quality and pitch range. The script is a vowel-centred vertical system, sometimes described as a reverse abjad, written along a central spine and structurally adapted to stacked vocalic marking rather than linear consonant chaining.