The Ursk Language

The Ursk language (Ursk: Ursksprak), ISO:URS is a Northwest Germanic language, which is the official language of Urskaland and Kaskedland. It is one of two lingua francas around the world, with the other being English. It is also one of the official languages of the Moradaland Council.

Ursk is spoken by an estimated 650 million L1 speakers, and an estimated 350 million L2 speakers, however around 2.8 billion other people around the world have some knowledge of the language.

Urskaland's status as a cultural and scientific centre of the world has meant that up to 50% of scientific papers published in Moradaland are written in Ursk.

Evolution
Proto-Norderonian (*óinyos)   -->   Proto-Germanic (*ainaz)  -->  Early Continental Ursk (*einnr)  --> Ursk (en)

Ursk belongs to the Germanic branch of the Norderonian language family.

Grammar
Ursk is a fusional language, adding affixes to root words to modify their meaning. The 3 genders of Early Continental Ursk became indistinguishable for each other, forming a common gender - this occurred as the distinguishable nasal vowel inflections ô, ǫ̂ and ą all lost their vowel quality, becoming ə, ər or ən depending on the situation. Some archaic phrases and idioms do retain the grammatical gendered endings.

Early Continental Ursk had 6 cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, instrumental and vocative), but the vocative is only retained in archaic idioms. This left 5 cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive and instrumental) in modern Ursk. ECU also had 3 noun genders, but this simplified to 2.

Ursk has a very regular grammatical structure due to frequent reanalysis, reanalogy and standardisation, making it quite easy to learn. There are some irregular features which have been kept due to frequent usage, such as the conjugations of the copula vasan.

Ursk is a V2 language, which means that verbs always take the second position in a phrase. It is also SOV, which means that auxiliary verbs send lexical verbs to the end. The concludant of a clause follows auxiliary-lexical alignment. There is also no indefinite article.