About
Safeive is one of Ion's major world languages, along with Ungrang and Pýaakm. It is also one of the official languages of the Eon Union, along with Ungrang, Pýaakm, Daraktik, and Throink. It has 389 million native speakers, mostly on the continent of Midoi, and 312 million proficien L2 speakers, for a total of 701 million speakers. Safeive is currently an official language in seven countries, Wahier, Javal Ta, Ja'feisla, D'o, Ja'Niada, Chasli, and Chawaval, which are the countries within the Midoian Union. There are minority populations of the language in Oogaboogumblur, Pagoi, and several countries on Scuton, with Safeive being a co-official language in Engblan, Zhorstav, and Hog Imperium. While not a co-official language, Safeive is also spoken by about 1-5% of people in Oogaboogumblur, Cetada, and Pagoi.
Safeive is also the most spoken language of any Midoian language, mostly due to the surpression of Midoians that occurred on the continent while under colonial rule from Qarip. While other Midoian languages still exist, they are not widely spoken. The second most spoken Midioan language, Taliln, only has ~7,630 living speakers, most of whom are elderly. There are efforts to revitalize many of these dying languages presented by several organizations across the Midoian countries, but not of them have been largely sucessful.
Safeive is written using Midoian Savio, an alphabet of 22 letters and 5 punctuation marks. Savio is an adapted form of a more traditional syllabic system of over 300 characters used by speakers of Archaic Safeive from the 1200s to the 1800s. Due to the very recent (on a linguistic scale) standardization of the spelling, the written language is almost identical to how the spoken language is pronounced. Marks for stress are not used within this alphabet, though fortunately stress is not a factor in word meaning.
Safeive is a fusional language, allowing for many prefixes and suffixes to be added to form complex meaning with few words. For example, the phrase "Riseaserafasefanalin fa" translates to "Maybe I will have been able to taste it," with everything but the final word in the translation being included in the verb, a highly conjugated form of "efanlin," to taste. Another example of this could be "Ja’de’te’wavafani," which roughly translates to "Land of Joyouness and Whimsy."
Standard Safeive
Creation
The standardized form of Safeive is administrated by the government of Javal Ta, one of the Midoian countries. All of the official dictionaries and learning materials are created by it. This standardized form was created from 1834 to 1840, simplifying many of the features of Archaic Safeive. Most of the words and grammar is taken from Archaic Safeive and other Southwest Midoian languages. The most important changes are the switch from head initial to head final, and the change of the sentence order from VOS to SVO. Some aspects of the phonology were changed, removing rarer sounds like [dɮ] and [tɬ]. All of these changes were changed to make the language easier to learn for the population of Midoi, which mostly spoke dialects of Thrionk and Ungrang, languages brought by the Qarip colonizers. The language was curated to be as easy to learn as possible by the linguist Glainpang Proing, who later changed his name to El'fe Ta, or High Linguist. This is highly accurate, as he was throughly sloshed much of the time. The most important reason for the creation of the language by the government was to rebuild the culture of Midoi that had been opressed by Qarip.
Learning Efforts
In 1841, the government of the New Midoian Empire (later split into the seven countries of Midoi) required at least three years of study for all people outside of schools, and all children in school to study it for the 10 years of public education provided by the government. The need to teach the language to the entirety of the population inadvertedly led to the foundation of the Midoian Public School System. Many cities with names given by Qarip, such as the capital Oqan, were renamed, with Oqan being renamed to Feisla. Government admidinstered maps, newspapers, and laws were written only in Safeive. By 1851, ten years after the policies had been introduced, the percentage of Midoians speaking a language native to the continent rose from 0.3% to 56.7%. By 1900, 98.7% of the population was fluent enough to hold a conversation in Safeive, and the majority of new people being born were learning the language natively. In 1953, with pressure from major world powers to be more open to trade, Midoian countries reworked their policies on foriegn matters, and one of the results of this was the printing of many books on learning Safeive. In the 1970s and 80s, many countries with Pagish roots began to require Safeive to be studied in schools, and Ooogaboogumblur (along with many Roian and Elephoian countries) began to require at least one year of study in public schools throughout the 2010s to the 30s. In 2046, it was named one of the official languages of Eon Union, which bolstered the amount of people learning it.
Phonology and Phonotactics
The maximal syllable in Safeive is CCVCC. An example of a word with this maximal structure is “Esraln”, meaning to wear.
Consonants
Safeive has 22 consonantal sounds, as seen in the chart below. The sound [w], which is not included in the chart, is also present in the language. Safeive is notable for its lack of the labial stops, [p] and [b], and for the relatively rare sounds of the palatal non-sibilant affricates, [cç] and [ɟʝ]. Safeive also tends to avoid palatalization and velarization, in most dialects only sticking to "basic" sounds.
