(I wasn't sure whether to post on r/Runeterran or here, but decided to do it here anyway. If you're not interested in niche linguistic stuff, do look away <3)

Hej everyone,

Last week I posted an overview of the Runeterran Language Tree, and promised that we would dive deeper into Ionian and its sounds while providing you all some basic Linguistic knowledge.. The next post will handle words and sentences, after which we're ready to start speaking. There will be a tl;dr at the bottom as usual.

Ionian is spoken by the humans on Ionia, and split from Vastayan when the vastayas and humans drifted apart from each other. I'm unsure how mutually intelligible they are, though there are some clues, such as that Xayah speaks with a human (Ionian?) accent.

When constructing language, it is my opinion that one should start at the tiniest part of speech, namely sounds. Sounds are later turned into syllables, which can be combined into words, which, in turn, will be used in phrases and sentences.

Brace yourselves for some our niche linguistic information that we must get through before getting to what most will consider the fun parts.

Sounds

Luckily for us, we don't have to guess about the pronunciation, since we have voice lines. The sources of these are Yasuo, Karma (possibly Ur-Ionian), Neeko and Neeko's theme (very likely Ur-Ionian) and some short notes from the brainstorm session of Jhin's name.

I indexed all this data, and noticed a few inconsistencies. For instance, the notes tell us to avoid 'v', while the Ionian word for 'sister' is svasa, as can be seen in Riven's universe story. The notes also tell us to avoid h, while Yasuo has multiple voicelines where he definitely pronounces [h]. This means that the phonetic inventory (all the sounds a language uses) will consist of some compromises. Below I write about the motivation for some sounds, if you have any other questions ask away.

Yasuo uses a palatalized t (so does Neeko's theme), written there like ch. A palatalized t is pronounced like tj. I chose to extend this palatalization to all similar sounds (which are called plosives) that were used, such as [d] and [g]. This already gave us 4 x 2 = 8 consonants, a decent start.

The ng sound was added because Ionian has nasal sounds (n and m) and velar sounds, (k and g). ng or [ŋ] is a velar nasal, makes sense to have it too.

For the v problem I chose a more um, radical change. The notes told us explicitly to avoid [v], but as I mentioned earlier, the Ionian word svasa exists, sitting outside our window, staring us to death.

I chose to see svasa as old spelling, meaning that the sv part is now pronounced differently than it used to. [v] is pronounced in the front of the mouth, while [s] is pronounced somewhere in the middle. (What I mean with 'being pronounced' is the place where the airflow is obstructed, which causes are all our unique sounds. For instance, the velar sounds are produced by raising your tongue at the velum, a part in the back of your mouth.) In the end I decided that the [v] sound, which possibly stems from Ur-Ionian, influenced the [s]. Since the v is pronounced at the front, let's say the v brings the s sound a bit more to the front too. And one step to the front from [s] brings us to [θ], which is pronounced like the th sound in breath. Svasa will then be pronounced like /θɑsɑ/, or thasa.

Another prominent sound that is missing is b, (although English doesn't really have a b either, but let's not get into that) but Riot's notes told us to exclude it.

The finished^tm consonant chart looks as follows (don't worry if you don't understand the categories, they're not too important to know. (Ionian also has the w sound, but that is a special case and does not fit in our table. Don't shoot the messenger :.;)

Ionian	(Labio)-Dental	Alveolar	Post-Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive		t, d, tj, dj			k, g, kj, gj
Nasal	ɱ	n			ŋ
Tap / Trill		r, ɾ
Fricative	θ	s, z	ʃ, ʒ		x	h
Approx.		ɹ		j
Lateral Approx.		l

The vowels aren't as interesting to talk about. The main takeaway is that I tried to keep the vowels simple in this chart, there is a little more to it than can be found in the table but I'm already trying to fit way too much in a single post. Furthermore, don't worry about the symbols, they will be explained fully next time. Front/Back describes the place of the tongue while Open/Close describes whether the mouth is opened or closed. (Do note the wonderful 'Open-Mid' position)

	Front	Back
Close	i	u
Close-Mid	e	o
Open-Mid	ɛ	ɔ
Open		ɑ

So now that we have strict rules about what sounds we can use, it's time to figure out how to put them together to form words. Let's take an English word such as 'mage'. These are all English sounds, so when we rearrange them, let's say 'game', we should get another English word right? Well... this isn't always the case, as the word 'mgae' is definitely not an English word. The rules for which syllables are allowed in a language are called the phonotactics of a language. Now that I've mentioned the official term, feel free to forget the term again.

A syllable can be split in three parts. Let's take the word dog. The onset of the syllable is the first part, in our case [d]. The second half of the syllable is called the rhyme, which is again split into the nucleus, often a vowel like [o] and the coda, or [g]. We need to get explicit rules about which parts are required, and which sounds are allowed in those positions. From looking at all the voicelines of Yasuo we can conclude that an Ionian syllable does not require an onset at every syllable such as in the word i-gei. The first syllable i, does not have any sounds preceding the vowel. The same word also proves that an Ionian syllable does not require a coda.

An nucleus, however, is required in every word and appears to be a vowel in every single source that I could find.

To go one step further, I haven't found any words with more than one sound in the beginning at the syllable. For example, the English monstrosity strength has three sounds at the beginning of the syllable, namely s, t, and r. Ionian syllables do not allow multiple sounds in the onset position. The exception being a combination like in Jhin's name, which is pronounced like dj (or officially [dʒ])

Moreover, the only sounds that are allowed at the end of the syllable are [n], [θ] and [ɹ] (which is the English r). I may add [s] and [l] to that, since they're pronounced at the same spot, but I'm not 100% sure on that yet.

We have set up our basic set of rules, but now you might think, what do these rules get us?

Well kind reader, they ensure that Ionian isn't influenced by other languages that I speak, or other people that are helping create this project. We can now test multiple words to see if they would be allowed in Ionian, and how an Ionian speaker may try to pronounce them if they aren't.

1. Hasagi -> Does not violate our rules, so pronounced roughly as you'd expect: /hɑsɑgiː/
2. Fair -> Does not violate our rules, so pronounced roughly as you'd expect. Note that Ionian does not have 'diphthongs.' (two vowels combining to create a 'new' sound such as in the word pie. If you pay close attention, note that when you pronounce pie you're saying p-ai) This leads to the pronunciation of fair being /fɑ.ir/, the dot indicating a new syllable.
3. Killash (a Shuriman village and non-ionian) -> Does violate our rules, since sh isn't allowed at the end of a syllable. Ionian adds a [o] sound to syllables that violate that rule, which you can think of as a repair strategy of sorts. Ionian pronunciation would then be /kilaʃo/ or kilasho

If you've come this far, I must say that I appreciate your dedication to our quest. There is so much more to sound such as stress and intonation, but I couldn't cover that in one single reddit post. Join me next time when we will finally start speaking Ionian! If you have any questions or notes (I'm not a lore-expert, so if I missed a name or source somewhere, please let me know!), you can post them below or hit me up on twitter at @songbirdur.

Thank you all for reading <3

Nanna

tl;dr I've set up a set of specific rules for the Ionian language, which is the required groundwork to start creating new words and sentences, and, in turn, start speaking Ionian

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