High Elven language

The High Elven language is the official language of the Kingdom of Froturn. The language has a long history ensuring great cultural and literary heritage. Even though it has been eclipsed by Etrandish as the language of global trade, and is no longer considered an all-beating language of classical literacy like Classical High Elven was, but the language still serves important purposes even outside Froturn - being considered the language of love, therefore used to compose romantic poetry and songs even by non-Elves.

The language also happens to be the de facto spoken lingua franca of the Church of Titanius spoken by clergymen from different linguistic backgrounds among each other, alongside the written lingua franca Classical High Elven.

Consonants

 * Voiceless consonants became aspirated
 * Voiced consonants became slack-voiced word-initially, lenited to fricatives between vowels and in the syllable coda.

Vowels

 * became before other vowels
 * The short got laxed to
 * Word-final became silent
 * merged with
 * merged with, at least in mainstream speech.
 * got preserved in a few dialects.
 * Short backed to
 * Long fronted to

Consonants

 * The labio-palatal approximant is a very unstable phoneme and is typically stretched into  or  even by the most educated speakers. Very often insert a bilabial fricative  between  and the following vowel, for example  being pronounced as
 * is realized as a flap intervocally and in the syllable coda, trilled  otherwise
 * The voiceless are aspirated, unless they are following  or in syllable coda
 * Coda-position are unreleased
 * Word-initial may be aspirated  by some speakers, but this is far from universal or standard
 * The voiced have varied pronunciation, depending on the environment:
 * Slack-voiced word-initially
 * Fully-voiced after nasals
 * Fricatives between vowels and in syllable coda
 * Coda-position is  after back vowels,  - or even  - after front vowels
 * The phoneme was traditionally realized as a fricative, and the phonemes  were traditionally realized as approximants . In contemporary High Elven, all of them vary between fricatives  and approximants.
 * is normally a fricative, but in intervocalic positions, it tends to soften to or even
 * was traditionally strictly an approximant, like . Nowadays, it's mostly a fricative with high amount of variation . The assibilation of to  is a growing phenomenon amongst the lower class population.
 * are denti-alveolar
 * are either apico-alveolar or postalveolar
 * Many speakers dissimilate the, realizing them as retroflex before back vowels and alveolo-palatal  before front vowels. This however is far from universal or standard.

Vowels

 * The language also has diphthongs:, , , , and . For the last four of them , there is some variation in the height of the first element , and  can even monophthongize to . In Standard High Elven, they are pronounced.
 * In native vocabulary, the schwa appears only in place of the former word-final  in poems and songs, which has become silent in common speech. Other than that, the schwa only appears in foreign words.
 * is rounded to when between the labial or labialized consonants.
 * the long is pronounced fully back  only in conservative and careful speech, especially by upper-class speakers. In casual speech - especially by lower-class speakers -  is typically realized as a centralized, while the short  is usually a fully back.
 * appear only in a few dialects as a result of the fronting of after . They are absent in Standard High Elven.
 * appaers only in a few dialects, preserving the sound from Middle High Elven. In Standard High Elven, has merged with.