Boteyese

Boteyese
botajkly
Flag of the Republic of the Boteys
Pronunciation	[ˈbotɐjklɨ]
Created by	Foreseen
Setting	Alternative history Europe, Southern Baltic Sea
Native to	the Boteys
Ethnicity	Boteyese
Native speakers	≈360,400 (2024)
Language family	language isolate Boteyese
Early forms	Proto-Boteyese Old Boteyese Early Modern Boteyese
Standard form	Standard Boteyese (based on Kodenburg Skaheyese)
Dialects	Skaheyese (skahajkly) Dearlandic (pallekockly) Focheyese (focajkly) Northern (forhaşkly/sfojkly) Odallandic (ojalkockly) Buhats (bjuhaşkly) †
Writing system	Latin
Official status
Regulated by	Boteyese Language Council / Botjar çOpst aHyngyj
Map of the Boteys, where Boteyese is spoken

Boteyese (/ˌboʊteɪˈiːz, ˌboʊ-/ BOW-tay-EASE; endonym: botajkly [ˈbotɐjklɨ], botjar çopst [ˈbotjɐr ˈʃopst], or rarely botajsky [ˈbotɐjskɨ]) is a language isolate spoken as a first language by about 360,400 Boteyese of whom 35,700 reside outside of the Boteys, mainly in Germany and Russia. Alongside Basque, it is one of the two known language isolates in Europe.

Owing to facts of Boteyese geography, history, and culture, the language is considered to feature many distinct regional varieties, not all of which are mutually intelligible. As of the mid-20th century however, the traditional dialect areas have been in steep decline, with some already being effectively moribund or extinct. The profound dialect levelling taking place has been variously attributed to the events of World War II, urbanization, changes in societal attitudes, and the continued prevalence of the standard language.

Boteyese features agglutinative and fusional elements and is of mixed head directionality. Its phonology and nominal morphology show close typological convergence with surrounding Indo-European languages, particularly North Germanic, though featuring no system of grammatical gender. Verbs are conjugated for subject and object, definiteness of arguments, tense/mood, voice, and aspect, and can take several nonfinite forms. Basic word order is verb-final, topic–comment, though information structure and situational syntactic constraints lead to some variation.

Etymology

The archipelago's endonym Botjar and the English exonym (the) Boteys both ultimately derive from Old Norse Bóteyjar, a compound of Old Norse bót (“bight, cove”) and Old Norse eyjar (“islands”). The Norse plural was not adapted into English, thus the name takes the English plural instead; cf. Orkney a.k.a. the Orkneys. It has been suggested that the conspicuous absence of a single native word referring to the entire people prior to the arrival of Norse settlement could be indicative of a fractious social order and/or lack of shared cultural consciousness.

The language names derive from the Old Norse lemma also. The modern term botajkly is the participle form of the verb botajky 'to speak Boteyese', while its archaic equivalent botajsky is derived with the suffix -sky (Old Boteyese -sku), used to form language names. The archaic suffix is of uncertain origin, but presumably the result of mixed influences from the dative singular form of early Modern Swedish language names (such as in the Gustav Vasa Bible e.g. på swensko) and continental Slavic i.e. Old Polish -ski.