Hejvat

Hejvat (former names: Keva, Evat) is a language spoken by the Keva people of New Cambria. It is the native language of the archipelago.

Originally spoken throughout the whole of New Cambria Island and its smaller neighbors, it is spoken today by an estimated 97,000 people in New Cambria (about 3.5% of the country's population), with its stronghold in the rural areas of North-West County, and several larger communities in Đor and Tain municipalities.

Since reliable record-keeping measures began in the late 1800s, the number of Hejvat speakers in New Cambria has fallen by over 60%. Though the decline has slowed considerably since the mid-1970s, fluency in the language continues to drop. The Keva community and the New Cambria government continue to promote the language, which has contributed to the increase in non-Keva learners of the language. It is taught in some primary and secondary schools in North-West County, and at both the University of New Cambria in Arvant and Hetkajve University in Đor.

Hejvat originated as an oral language, but a written syllabic cript emerged as early as the 13th century, and most likely much earlier, as evidenced by excavated relics discovered at the Njajve archaeological site in the 1940s. The writings discovered there remain the oldest verifiable sample of Hejvat in its written form.

The Hejvat syllabary, colloquially referred to by the early European settlers as "squarehand" due to its boxy, square-like characters, was replaced by the first of several romanized versions of the language in the early 1700s. This version used only 19 letters and failed to capture the nuances of the language's phonology. It was from this version that the word "Keva" began being used to refer to the people, the culture and the language of New Cambria's native inhabitants. At least five other Hejvat alphabets achieved wide use over the centuries, most of them containing confusing and non-standardized digraphs (and sometimes, trigraphs) of English letters, until the current version was devised in 1959. The 1959 version consists of 23 consonant sounds and 8 vowel sounds, using nearly all standard roman letters. Today, the "squarehand" syllabary is used in decorative and cultural purposes, but virtually all correspondence and media produced in Hejvat is written in the romanized version.

Alphabet
In its latinized form, Hejvat consists of 31 letters. Four standard latin letters (Q, W, X and Y) are not used, and one non-standard letter (Đ) is added. Eight digraphs are also used.
 * Consonants: b, c, ch, d, đ, f, g, h, j, k, l, lj, m, n, nj, p, r, s, sh, t, v, z, zh
 * Vowels: a, aj, e, ej, i, o, oj, u

Vowel sounds can exist alone, or placed after a consonant for a total of 192 unique syllabic sounds. Additionally, 20 of the 23 consonants (not including j, lj and nj) can be used in final form without preceding a vowel.

When children are first learning Hejvat, the words are spelled with their syllables separated (eg. ka-lo-r nje-pa be-li-ja ka-za-pe-re-li-te-t), but standardized Hejvat is not written this way (eg. kalor njepa belija kazaperelitet).