Dwarven Koiné

Dwarven Koiné is the closest equivalent to a standard variant of the Dwarven language, created by an amalgamation of the most influential dialects, with influence from the conservative Temple Dwarven.

Evolution from Classical Koiné

 * The voiceless bilabial fricatives become labiodental.
 * The voiced bilabial fricatives and the labio-dorsal approximants  merge into labiodental approximants.
 * The light dorsal is debuccalized to, while  is fully merged into . The dark dorsal  remained unchanged.
 * Vowel shifts:
 * Shift of the long to . The short  remained unaffected.
 * Diphthongization of to.
 * The short merge into .  are unaffected.
 * The remaining long vowels are diphthongized to . Their short equivalents  are laxed.
 * The end result was a vowel inventors consisting of 7 phonemically short vowels, one phonemically long vowel and 7 dipthongs,.

Consonants

 * The retroflex stops are allophones of the corresponding dental stops  in the clusters . They are not phonemic.
 * Stop + Sibilant  clusters tend to coalesce into affricates . These clusters appear between vowels in native words - in loanwords, they also appear in other positions, such as word-initially and after nasals. They tend to be deaffricated when not followed by a vowel.
 * In the majority of dialects - hence also for the majority of speakers of Koiné - is realized as uvular  rather than velar . Its voiced counterpart  however is consistently velar, otherwise it would collide with the uvular rhotic  - as a matter of fact, a few dialects do in fact merge  into , but this is stigmatized elsewhere.
 * It is also important to note, that the light and dark consonants do not contrast with each other, except before the vowel, which is a result of a merger of two historical vowels. Other than that the contrast before , light consonants can only occour before and other light consonants, while dark consonants can only occour before  and other dark consonants. Consonants harmonize with other consonants that follow them, making sure that consonant clusters consist of only dark or light consonants.
 * This is somewhat complicated by the fact that unstressed short vowels are reduced to a schwa, but keep their palatalizing/lightening or velarizing/darkening effect on the preceding consonant. This results in dark and light consonants also contrasting before the schwa in addition to.
 * It should also be noted that lots of speakers front to  and retract  to, which avoids making the allophonic feature contrastive.

Vowels

 * The tense close vowels are a free variation between centralizing diphthongs, raising diphthongs  and long vowels . Since pronouncing them as centralizing diphthongs is the most widespread, they are phonologically treated as such - nevertheless, all three are equally acceptable, it's just that the first one is the most widespread.
 * The mid lax vowels are somewhat raised
 * The non-central open lax vowels are somewhat centralized . Some speakers might go as far as realizing them as central, but keep them raised to prevent complete merger with.
 * Loanwords may contain the rounded front vowels, but their exact pronunciation is not set in stone: they may be raised and therefore merged with , unrounded and therefore merged with , or centralized.
 * Unstressed short vowels are reduced to a schwa, but keep their palatalizing/lightening or velarizing/darkening effect on the preceding consonant. This results in dark and light consonants also contrasting before the schwa in addition to.
 * Lots of speakers front to  and retract  to, which avoids making the allophonic feature contrastive.
 * In the prestige dialect, this unstressed short vowel is always pronounced. In colloquial varieties, this vowel however is removed word-finally.
 * In Temple Dwarven, this vowel reduction never happens - all vowels are intended to be pronounced clearly, as if they were stressed.

Stress
Primary stress always falls on the first syllable. Secondary stress falls on odd-numbered syllables, with the one extra rule that the final syllable in a multi-syllable word can never be stressed. Stress is never indicated in the orthography.