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:
 * The light vowels respectively shift to
 * The dark vowels respectively shift to
 * The long close vowels diphthongize  in mainstream speech. In contrast with the aforementioend shifts that took place very early, this is a more recent development.

Vowels

 * The distribution of vowels is limited by these constraints:
 * The vowels in bright yellow are classified as "light vowels" and thus can only appear after slender consonants
 * The vowels in grey are classified as "dark vowels" and thus can only appear after broad consonants
 * The vowels in greyish-yellow are classified as "neutral vowels" and thus can appear after both broad and slender consonants
 * The vowels in blue are classified as "foreign vowels" and thus can only appear in loanwords. Whether they are constrained to appear after broad or slender consonants is not set in stone.
 * 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.