Norlokian languages

The Norlokian language family is a family of languages (two to be exact: Halfling and Dwarven) spoken on the continent of Artograch.

Shared features
Both Norlokian languages, having evolved from the same Proto-Norlokian language shared quite a lot of features from the get go, but what is even more intriguing is the fact, that as they moved away from the Proto-Norlokian roots, both languages shared a good number of innovations: and both of them developed these in isolation, without influence from one another, as the two languages were geographically separated.

The most important such feature is the way words are formed in the Norlokian languages, or rather, were formed initially: from combining consonantal roots and vocalic templates into complete words. This isn't a feature unique to the Norlokian language family, as the unrelated Gabyrian language does the exact same thing to this very day, and various Oriental languages also do this. Both Dwarven and Halfling gradually moved away from this technique towards more conventional means of wordbuilding, gravitating more towards agglutination possibly due to prolonged contact with the Elven languages following the second millenium BEKE (though never becoming actual agglutinating languages like the Elven languages). A more conservative form of Dwarven, called Temple Dwarven still retains the old-fashioned method of wordbuilding via combining consonantal roots and vocalic templates - this continues to be the preferred method of coining neologisms in the Dwarven language for official usage (as opposed to colloquial usage).

Both Dwarven and Halfling innovated several features independently of each other that increased the total number of consonantal and vowel phonemes, such as lenition (which introduced non-sibilant fricatives to both languages), monophthongization and vowel mutation. While proto-Norlokian was a language that relied mostly on stops, both Classical Dwarven and post-proto-Halfling became rich in fricatives. The original 4-vowel system of proto-Norlokian gave way to the 10-vowel system of Classical Dwarven and the 6-vowel system of Proto-Halfling.