Brenadine Tainean

Neo-Tainean
Brenadine Tainean, Reform Tainean
Neau-Tainien, Tainien Brenadien, Tainien Reforme
Region	Vallos
Native speakers	L1: 42.6 million L2: 3.2 million Total: 45.8 million
Language family	Cronan Ta-Cronan Vallos Ta-Cronan Latino-Tainean Burgo-Tainean Bernado-Tainean Neo-Tainean
Early forms	Tainean Latino-Tainean pidgin Burgo-Tainean creole Brenado-Tainean creole
Writing system	Latin (Brenadine Tainean alphabet) Brenadine Tainean Braille
Signed forms	Manually coded Brenadine Tainean
Official status
Official language in	Almadaria Arona Rumahoki
Recognised minority language in	Equatorial Ostiecia
Regulated by	Academy for the Preservation of Tainean Culture
Language codes
ISO 639-1	bt
ISO 639-2	brt
ISO 639-3	brt
Linguasphere	82-AAA-bb

Brenadine Tainean (Tainien Brenadien), known in Almadaria and Rumahoki as Reform Tainean (Tainien Reforme), also known as Neo-Tainean (Neau-Tainien), is a Latino-Tainean language in the Cronan language family. Originating in the year 1904, today Brenadine Tainean is an official language in Rumahoki and Arona, and is a regional language in Burgoignesc Equatorial Ostiecia. Presently, there are over over 45 million speakers of Brenadine Tainean.

Tainean is named after the Taineans, the descendants of an ancient Cronan group that migrated from Crona in the 12 Century BC via the few Heaven Ships which have managed to land in Vallos, who soon intermarried with the indigenous Vallosi people, and its speakers are called Tainophones. Brenadine Tainean accounts for over 90% of speakers of the Tainean language branch.

Latino-Tainean pidgin began as the result of contact between the Taineans and the Latins during antiquity. This creole utilised Latino-Tainean pidgins and languages as a lingua franca between the two groups. With the influx of Bergendii Protestant refugees in the 19th Century, the Latino-Tainean pidgin soon became Burgo-Tainean creole with loanwords from Burgoignesc finding their way into Tainean vocabulary. By 1900, the language had evolved into Brenado-Tainean creole, and by that time the Academy for the Preservation of Tainean Culture had decided to embark on a significant reform of the creole along the lines of Burgoignesc, most notably the use of Latino-Tainean innovations alongside Burgoignesc-style spelling and grammatical construction. In 1904, these reforms culminated in the birth of Brenadine Tainean, with the new language starting to be used in Ostiecian schools in 1905, in Aronan schools in 1907, and in schools in what's now northern Rumahoki in 1911, displacing native Tainean dialects as the most commonly-spoken form of Tainean by 1952.

Classification

Brenadine Tainean is a Cronan language and belongs to the Vallosi Ta-Cronan group of the Ta-Cronan languages. Tainean originated from a Ta-Cronan tribal and linguistic continuum along the northern Vallos coast, whose language gradually evolved into Latino-Tainean pidgin upon contact with the Latinic peoples from Sarpedon. This eventually evolved into Burgo-Tainean creole after the influx of Bergendii people, and by 1900 evolved into Brenado-Tainean creole which served as the basis for Brenadine Tainean.

The development of Brenadine Tainean isolated the language from the other Ta-Cronan languages and influences and even from native Tainean itself, and has since diverged considerably. Brenadine Tainean is not mutually intelligible with any of the remaining native Tainean dialect, differing in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology.

The development of Brenadine Tainean was also influenced by a long series of contact with foreign peoples with their own languages, particularly Burgoignesc. This left a profound mark of their own on the language, so that Brenadine Tainean shows some similarities in vocabulary and grammar with languages outside its linguistic clades, with Burgoignesc loanwords being mutually intelligible in sound between the two languages. Because of this, some scholars have argued that Brenadine Tainean may be considered a mixed language or a creole language much like its linguistic ancestors. Although the great influence of Burgoignesc on the vocabulary and grammar of Brenadine Tainean is widely acknowledged, most specialists in language contact do not consider Brenadine Tainean to be a true mixed language.

Brenadine Tainean is classified as a Ta-Cronan language because it shares innovations with native Tainean dialects. These shared innovations showed that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor called Cronan. Brenadine Tainean is classified as a Brenado-Tainean language because of the heavy influence of the Burgoignesc language.

Phonology

Vowels

Oral vowel phonemes in Brenadine Tainean

	Front		Central	Back
	unrounded	rounded
Close	i	y		u (ou)
Close-mid	e	ø	ə	o (au)
Open-mid	ɛ (ai)	œ		ɔ
Open	a		ä (a)	ɑ

Nasal vowel phonemes in Brenadine Tainean

	Front		Back
	unrounded	rounded
Open-mid	ɛ̃ (ai)	œ̃	ɔ̃
Open			ɑ̃

Consonants

Consonant phonemes in Brenadine Tainean

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m	n	ɲ	ŋ
Plosive	voiceless	p	t		k (k/q)
	voiced	b	d (d/r)		g
Fricative	voiceless	f	s (c/s)	ʃ	ʁ	h (h/x)
	voiced	v	z (s)	ʒ (g)
Approximant	plain		l	j (i)
	labial			ɥ (ou)	w (gou/hou/ou)