Maktó is the most widely distributed language of Northern Wejít. The name of the language can be literally translated as 'exchange-chat' or 'swap-speech', referencing its original most common usage. It is estimated that there are roughly 1½ billion people speaking Maktó.
History[]
The roots of Maktó date at least two millennia back. It originated as a trade pidgin used alongside the most travelled routes of Northern Wejít, borrowing and simplifying words from adjacent languages. As a result, its vocabulary contains words from very wide geographic origins, including many words from now-dead languages.
Over millennia, Maktó developed into a full-fledged language, gaining a non-mercantile vocabulary and a more solidified syntax. Nowadays, it's a language as rich as any other, and is the first spoken language for many Wejít. Even in Southern Wejít there are some regions where it dominates, though usually it's relegated to a secondary language used in international negotiations there.
Structure[]
Alphabet[]
Maktó has the shortest alphabet of the major Etéran languages, called Waminuktelpo, containing only 12 letters. It is also the most orthographically shallow language of the planet, having a perfect mapping of phonemes to letters.
Waminuktelpo
This causes some difficulties with transcribing or pronouncing names. As a result, it is common to borrow letters and sounds from other languages for writing names that have not been fully naturalised by the language. It is traditional to include a Waminktelpo transliteration hint as a superscript or subscript next to such a name (either commenting only foreign letters, or writing out the whole name in Waminuktelpo under or over the non-naturalised name). The most common language for letter-borrowing is Géshkir.
Waminktelpo is usually written left to right.
Phonology[]
Aside from the poor phonetic inventory, Maktó is noted for its tendency have clusters of several vowels in a row, and avoiding clusters of consonants. Clustered vowels often but not always merge into diphthongs.
Morphology[]
What little inflexion the language has is achieved through agglutination. There is no distinction of plural vs. singular, and no case system to speak of. While notionally the language has three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), in practice they have only been retained in first-person singular pronouns.
Syntax[]
Maktó follows a Subject-Verb-Object pattern, and puts adjectives before the relevant noun. Tenses are formed by using auxiliary verbs.