Kuduk Language

Kuduk
, Tanatōxa
Tanatōxa written in tano (top) and takara (bottom).
Created by	None
Ethnicity	Kuduk (Yaki, Nekomimi etc from Kuduk)
Users	900,000 (2022)
Purpose	Kuduk
Early forms	Middle Kuduk; Classical Kuduk Old Kuduk Ancient Kuduk
Standard forms	Modern Standard Kuduk (Kuduk)
Dialects	Modern Standard Kuduk Chóokaneidi Heitsuk Hakka Xunáa Huaduk Haichuk
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–

The Kuduk Language (Kuduk: Tanatōxa) is a language split into several distinct dialects solely spoken within the Tribal Federation of Kuduk. It is the sole official and national language of Kuduk and is a recognized language of the RCEU. Kuduk's dialects tend to differ in phonology and pronunciation, though rarely differ in grammar. Modern Standard Kuduk (MSK) was created during the 19th century as a bridging language between the differing dialects of Kuduk. There is an estimated 900,000 people who speak Kuduk at a native level.

Kuduk is considered an agglutinative, polysynthetic language with many affixes and few root words with many meanings prescribed to them. Kuduk is also considered a tenseless language, marking time via separate words to establish time references and numbers to represent plurality.

Kuduk is written using two writing systems: a logographic system (Kuduk: tano), and a syllabic system (Kuduk: takara). Tano is the older of the two systems and predates Takara by about a few hundred years. Takara was created, generally by those of lower classes, in order to write the names of people and places and to act as a substitute to lessen the amount of logographs one needed to memorize. Later on, Takara was used to write loan words. Its debated over how many strokes modern Tano has exactly, but many linguists agree that it has at the very least 6 distinct strokes that could make up a logograph.

Kuduk used to be considered a language isolate, but has since been reclassified from a sole language to the Kuduk Language Family which encompasses the several dialects spoken in Kuduk. Although the spoken varieties of Kuduk are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Kuduk is ongoing.

Varieties

Grouping

Proportions of first-language speakers

  Chóokaneidi (32.5%)

  Heitsuk (21.4%)

  Hakka (19.3%)

  Xunáa (10.5%)

  Huaduk (10.2%)

  Haichuk (0.6%)

  Others ({{{value7}}}%)