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 Old Dwarven - The Classical Koiné

 * The nine (eighteen with vowel length distinction) allophones of original three (six with vowel length distinction) vowels of Old Dwarven become phonemic.
 * - previously pronounced as - become the new
 * - previously pronounced as - become the new
 * - previously pronounced as - become the new . They retain their pharengyalized pronounciations. Despite actually being front vowels,  were treated as back vowels in all the shifts that followed.
 * The dark dorsal approximant becomes silent, helping to phonemicize the word-initial vowels.
 * The original became postalveolar, leaving only the neutral  as alveolar.
 * The original three categories of consonants - dark, neutral, light - contract to just two: dark and light. Previously neutral consonants become light before front vowels, become dark otherwise. The only exception to this is the dorsal series, where the dark unconditionally merge into the neutral  instead. However, the original  do shift to  before front vowels.
 * The end result was a consonant inventory that consists of


 * Lenition: the original voiced stops developed fricative allophones  in post-vocalic positions. In the same positions, the original voiceless stops  became voiced.
 * Before other voiceless consonants, became fricatives instead . The only exception to this was word-initial consonant clusters like, where the second stop got lenited instead of the first one. For example, the original  became.
 * Certain grammatical contexts also invoked the lenition of voiceless stops to voiceless fricatives instead of voiced stops.
 * All in all, the end result was a consonant inventory consisting of.

Evolution from the 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.

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.