Lashagah language

Catayapay (Catayapay: Qapjakinhpunh’wapap, syllabics: ᖃᑉᔪᑭᓒᐳᓒᐞᐗᐸᑉ, pronounced /qapja'kẽpõʔwapap/) is a Sitouatian language spoken by the Catayapay people in Qapjakinhpunht First Nation. In 2018, the language had 10,540 native speakers, all members of the First Nation, divided amongst two dialects: Qapjakinhpunht, also known as Lower or Lake Catayapay, and Twika’unhtipjapunht, also known as Upper or River Catayapay. The First Nation is the only subnational entity in which the language has official status.

Phonology
The contrastive phonemes in Qapjakinhpunht Catayapay can be divided as follows:

Vowels
Vowels have both stressed an unstressed qualities, though these are not contrastive and purely phonetic. The vowel /a/ has front and back allophones, as well as an unstressed and non-contrastive nasalized form. In comparison, nasalization with /i/, /u/, and /ẽ/, /õ/ is contrastive and therefore do not overlap. Nasal spreading is quite common when /a/ and /ẽ/ or /õ/-nuclear syllables border.

Consonants
As voicing is not contrastive for stops, fricatives and sibilant fricatives, they have both voiceless and voiced allophones, with the voiced allophones being measurably more common word-medially. /χ/ has velar allophones, the result of a merger of a previous velar fricative phoneme with its uvular counterpart, leading to its variable pronunciation. The trill /r/ has the allophone /ɹ/, considerably more common among younger speakers. Phonemically, the approximants /w/ and /j/ are not short variants of /u/ and /i/, they are instead considered full consonants, although the only consonants that can form clusters in roots.

Phonotactics
The max syllable structure for roots is (C)(A)V(A)(C), where C is any consonant, A is an approximant /w/ or /j/, and V the nuclear vowel. Note that approximants cannot occur both preceding and succeeding a vowel, they are exclusive with each other. Across syllable boundaries, geminate consonants are not allowed, they are simplified to their singular variants. Clusters of two plosives are not allowed, they are simplified when the first plosive is deleted. However, clusters of fricatives, nasals, sibilants or approximants and plosives are allowed, although the length of the cluster may not exceed two consonants in a row. /χ/ is frequently lenited to /h/ preceding a consonant. For example: šakahqiwt, ᔕᑲᐦᕿᐤᑦ, "consciously" can be glossed as |think-live-ADV|, or morphemically as |šak=ax=qiwt|, where /χ/ is lenited to /h/ before /q/.

Orthography
Catayapay is written using two standard systems, an alphabet using a modified set of Agrestic characters, and an abugida syllabary similar to those used for other languages native to northern !North America. Catayapay has been traditionally written with the Catayapay syllabary, and it is still the dominant system, however lack of support on many typing machines such as typewriters and computers have popularized the Agrestic system through ease of use.

Agrestic script
The Agrestic-based script used for Catayapay is an, meaning that one character usually represents one phoneme. However, in Catayapay, two trigraphs are used to represent the nasal vowels /ẽ/ and /õ/.

Syllabary
The syllabary with which Catayapay is traditionally written is one where a base form is implied, in this system the form of the consonant plus the vowel /a/, and then this form is rotated to give syllables that are a combination of the base consonant and another vowel. An exception to this rule is the sounds /q/, /ʔ/, /w/ and /h/, which are characters that cannot be combined with a vowel. Nasal vowels are written using the backwards radical for the set /n/. At the end of a syllable or as part of a consonant cluster not preceding a vowel, characters are written superscript in their a-rotation pattern, also called their "radical".

Sample text
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

The North Wind and the Sun: