For context: This conworld is an alt-earth in which the Indo-Europeans were either assimilated or wiped out early on, leaving the pre-IE peoples to inherit the earth. There are some familiar faces in Europe: the Finno-Ugric family is much more widespread, there is a full-fledged Vasconic family, Turkic languages dominate the Balkans and the southeast, and Etruscan and Punic are now classical languages with whole subfamilies of living descendants ("Etrurian" and "Carthaginian" now refer to heterogeneous cultural-linguistic phyla as diverse as "Romance" or "Slavic" in our own world). There are also dozens of previously unknown isolates and minor families scattered across the European continent. Something unfamiliar is the Icastric family, whose range stretches from the British Isles and all across the northern parts of Western and Central Europe until it meets the Southern Finnic and Kypchak Turkic languages east of the Vistula. The most widely spoken and most culturally dominant Icastric language is Icastrian, the language of Icastria [the British Isles] and the administrative language and lingua franca of her colonial empire, which stretches from Brittany to Denmark and the southern part of the Scandinavian peninsula. I've posted a good deal of Icastrian in this forum, but of all the languages I've posited for this world, the only other one I've actually sat down and designed is Turo.
As far as cultural and technology levels go, I don't really know how you classify that, but the setting here is broadly late modern. However, there is a lot of variation in standards of living between the core and periphery of the Empire due to the wealth-centralizing effects of the dominant economic ideology of mercantilism. To wit, if you were teleported to a major metropolitan area in Icastria you might guess you were somewhere between about 1910 and 1930; whereas if you ended up in a remote coastal village in Turoryfn, you might guess you were as far back as the late 18th century.
Now then...
Turo • Vuonakiel • Uyovaƕıεc
Turo (vuonakiel) is a Baltic-Finnic language, the westernmost variant of the Northern Finnic dialect continuum that stretches from the White Sea to the Icastrian Sea [North Sea]. It is spoken by about 400,000 people in Turoryfn (Icastrian pronunciation [ˈtʊɾoɾəʊn]), the northernmost province of the Icastrian Empire, which is largely contiguous with our world's region of Western Norway/Vestlandet. Turoryfn borders the Icastrian province of Iljaryfn to the east and the Sámi Confederacy to the north.
The name Turo is an Icastrian exonym with a Finnic origin. The name comes from the Nothern Finnic term turo, a structure for catching fish built from tree branches. The early Icastrian chroniclers described the Turo as "a coastal fishing people, distinguished by their use of the turo," as the Turo have traditionally made their living as fishermen due to the paucity and expense of arable land in Turoryfn. Of course the Turo were not the only Finnic people who used the turo; they were simply the first ones the Icastrians observed doing so (and nowadays they use woven nets). The Turo refer to themselves as vuonalašt, literally "fjord dwellers" or "the ones from the fjords" (sg. vuonalane), and their country as Vuonamaa "Fjordland" or more colloquially Vuonat "The Fjords." Their language is vuonakiel "fjord-tongue" or simply miedankiel~mierankiel "our language" (though the latter name is more versatile - it may refer to Turo in contrast to Ilja, or to Turo and Ilja together in contrast to Icastrian, etc.).
Turo is a member of the Cisbothnian Finnish dialect group (in Icastrian, iseyn-pohjaförtelais suomia savefold) - the Northern Finnic dialects spoken on the Scandinavian peninsula, as opposed to the Transbothnian group (aseyn-pohjaförtelais suomi), spoken in Finland and Karelia (the directionality of these geographic designations reflects a degree of Icastrocentrism in Northern European linguistics; however all Cisbothnian histories hold that these peoples originally migrated from Finland). The Cisbothnian dialect group also includes the Ilja dialects (spoken in Eastern and Southern Norway), the Härve dialects (spoken in southern Svealand and northern Götaland), and the Salomaa dialects (spoken in northern Svealand and southern Norrland).
These dialects comprise a continuum, and the exact division between Turo and Ilja is more a matter of political geography than linguistic methodological rigor. Complicating matters is the fact that speakers of transitional dialects often call their language vuorkiel "mountain-tongue" or simply miedankiel/meidankiel, and may self-identify as Turo, Ilja, neither, or even both. Turo has no standard dialect, and each speaker speaks and writes according to his or her own dialectal form; all dialects of Turo are mutually intelligible.
Phonologically and morphologically, Turo and the other Cisbothnian varieties share a number of features that set them apart from both the Western Finnish and Eastern Finnish dialect groups. The Cisbothnian dialects retain a number of archaic features that have been lost throughout Finland and Karelia, including a full set of weak-grade voiced stops (actually fortition from earlier β ð ɣ, to which weird stuff happened in Finnish and Karelian) and retention of the reflex of Proto-Finnish *βi in the third singular: Turo tulev "he comes" (cf. Old Finnish tuleu) vs. tulee. However there are also similarities, some of which have arguably arisen by chance: for example ie üö uo from earlier ee öö oo were innovated independently and asynchronously on either side of the Gulf of Bothnia, long after the Cisbothnian migration.
The Cisbothnian vocabulary in particular is markedly divergent, having been heavily influenced by Icastrian through centuries of colonial rule - even in Salomaa, where the Icastrian flag has never flown, Icastrian loans make up a substantial proportion of the lexicon. Dual use of native words and Icastrian loans with similar meanings illustrates the Turo's socioeconomic and political situation as colonial subjects:
- äänestaa, meaning "to vote" in Finland, means "to petition" in Turo; "to vote" is raštata, from Icastrian hraist-. The Turo can petition the Icastrian colonial government for a redress of grievances, but only Icastrians have the vote (not that there are many elections in the Icastrian Empire).
- tere, "house" in Icastrian, is "government" in Turo, by synecdoche from the customs house, the seat of the colonial government in the provincial capital of Fôrnafh (Turo Vöörnava, located near our world's Stavanger).
- tüöda means "to work;" haarata, from Icastrian hár- "work," means "to be employed, to have a wage-earning job" - a more prestigious station than the cottage industry or independent farming/fishing.
