The Ćwarmin-Ŋʒädär Family of Languages

Ćwarmin belongs to a geographical span of about two dozen languages with transitional zones between them. Ćwarmin itself is the southeasternmost of these languages – there is a geographical discontinuity from Ćwarmin to the east, but after some nearly uninhabited regions as well as some regions where languages related to Tatediem, as well as some local relict populations still exist, a few non-contiguous zones of languages related to Ćwarmin appear. Ŋʒädär, being the language with the largest population in the whole family beside Ćwarmin, can reasonably be used as the other language by whose name to form a compound term for the whole family. It also belongs to a clearly different branch - one of the three principal branches - of the family.

In some senses, Ćwarmin is somewhat exceptional, in having lost several features characteristic of the family:

• the inverse system
• the lack of a distinct accusative case (however, the reflexively possessed suffix does go on reflexively possessed objects in related languages as well), but also an inverse alignment
• the proximate-obviative system (or rather, it is drastically reanalyzed in Ćwarmin)
• the front rounded vowels
• the requirement that non-pronominal roots be at least bisyllabic
• some prefixing (only traces remaining in Ćwarmin)
• a rich system of participles
• morphological differentiation between transitive and intransitive verbs
• loss of ejectives (due to Dairwuo-Bryatesle influence)

We can notice in fact, that Ćwarmin's unrelated neighbour - Dairwueh - acquired the beginnings of a proximative-obviative system from other, now extinct languages of Ćwarmin-Ŋʒädär stock, but the differences between the systems in early Ćwarmin and early Dairwueh influenced Ćwarmin more. It seems that Dairwueh's population largely derives from groups that have spoken languages closely related to Ćwarmin.

Ćwarmin has kept many features intact though:

• vowel harmony
• palatal consonants
• mostly suffixing (although Ćwarmin has indeed nearly maxed this feature out)
• a rather simple tense-aspect system (other branches seem to have created more complicated things) with regards to finite verbs
• separate cases for complements (a separate object complement case is known in roughly a third of the Ćwarmin-Ŋzädär stock, nearly all sub-branches have languages in them that have it, and nearly all languages have traces of it)
• mainly dependent-marking
• the paucal number
• a rich case system (which it in fact has also almost maxed out)

In the farther eastern branches, a few interesting developments have occurred:

• Parts of the Dagurib branch (insular) has abolished consonant clusters almost thoroughly, and has lost a lot of the case system, and extended the inverse to some rather odd constructions
• The Ŋʒädär branches only have traces of the paucal
• The Dagurib have turned the paucal into a dual, but have also restricted it to only appear on nominatives and accusatives and pronouns and a small set of nouns.
• Ŋʒädär languages have developed a greater amount of adjective congruence
• Ŋʒädär languages have increased the morphological complexity of the verb significantly, with significant numbers of voices, aspects, moods and so forth.
• the non-insular Dagurib languages have developed a gender system, and also a gender-based congruence system; the inverse system has been quite strongly affected by the gender system as well.

The Ćwarmin-Ŋʒädär languages cover pretty much all of the arctic region of the world they inhabit. The only exceptions are incursions along the southern border of the arctic region, where groups related to Dairwueh and Bryatesle, Tatediem as well as Barxaw intrude. In addition, four small isolate languages persist in small pockets among the Ćwarmin-Ŋʒädär areas. Three of these are typologically very similar to the ĆŊ languages, whereas the fourth is quite exceptional.