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).

Another such shared feature (and innovation) is phonological: the exchanges between the vowel system and consonantal system - initially, Old Dwarven inherited the same system that Proto-Norlokian had, which consisted of three phonemic vowels (six if we count their long variants, given the vowel length distinction), and consonants with dark, neutral and light variants. At first, these three variants of the consonants were phonemic - while they did heavily alter the way vowels after them would be pronounced (light consonants giving vowels a palatal colouring, dark consonants giving vowels a larynhgeal colouring), these new vowels were initially allophonic. In Classical Dwarven, these vowel allophones became phonemic, while the original phonemic dark-neutral-light distinction was replaced by dark-light allophony, with light consonants occouring before and after non-pharyngeal front vowels, dark consonants occouring everywhere else (before and after back vowels and pharyngealized front vowels). Old Halfling also had the exact same innovation, but it beat Dwarven to it by at least a millenium.

The end result of the aforementioned shared innovation was that both Dwarven and Halfling would have an increased number of phonemic vowels compared to their common ancestor. The loss of the original phonemic dark-neutral-light distinction of consonants, and its replacement with an allophonic dark-light distinction did not necessarily cause an actual drop of consonants that are kept distinct, as both languages had innovations that increased number of phonemically distinguished consonants in total. While Proto-Norlokian relied heavily on plosives and was rather poor in fricatives, both Halfling and Dwarven introduced a large number of new fricatives, partially from the lenition of existing plosives, partially from the splitting of existing fricative phonemes (this was the case for sibilants).