I have begun an individual project of this type. I meant to keep it individual until completion (simply because I like control), but I will provide what help I can. Not that I'm a linguistics genius or anything.
First, as was suggested, I looked at the sounds themselves, making two lists of letter frequency and position:
a-874 b-304 4058 vowels
^-34 c-53 a-24.6%
:-33 d-421 e-19.3%
'-18 f-50 i-19.4%
`-14 g-436 o-20.1%
@-31 u-16.4%
(-.2%)
e-695 k-485
^-29 l-645 6373 consonants
:-30 m-518 Type:(-1.6%)
'-14 n-524 stops-------36.1% (24%) (+12.1)
`-16 fricatives--25.5% (32%) (-6.5)
affricates--0% (8%) (-8)
i-686 r-657 liquids-----20.4% (8%) (+12.4)
^-37 s-657 nasals------16.4% (12%) (+4.4)
:-31 t-600 Location:(-.7%)
'-17 v-86 bilabial----12.8% (20%) (-7.2)
`-16 labiodental-2.1% (8%) (-5.9)
interdental-5.0% (8%) (-3)
o-721 alveolar----58.6% (28%) (+30.6)
^-26 z-228 palatal-----4.6% (20%) (-15.4)
:-32 velar-------16.1% (12%) (+4.1)
'-19 ng-102 glottal-----0% (4%) (-4%)
`-18 th-307 Voice: (+-0.0%)
sh-290 voiced------61.7% (60%) (+1.7)
u-609 tth-10 unvoiced----38.3% (40%) (-1.7)
^-30
'-13
`-15
Frontal Medial Final Frontal Medial Final
b 84 142 78 stps 25.0%
t 100 286 214 fric 19.0%
d 94 174 153 affr 0%
c 19 34 0 liqd 10.1%
k 144 189 152 nasl 11.6%
g 102 253 81 glds 0 0 0
f 30 20 0 bilab 8.8%
v 42 44 0 lbdnt 3.3%
th 61 106 140 indnt 2.8%
tth 0 10 0 alvlr 34.9%
s 138 358 161 paltl 2.9%
z 79 94 55 velar 13.0%
sh 63 105 122 glttl 0%
l 107 231 307 voice
r 113 277 267 unvce
m 107 211 200
n 127 194 203
ng 17 45 40
(I think the second list is incomplete)
An explanation:
The first list shows, in the left columns, the number of times each letter appears in the wordlist (note that ng, th, sh, and tth [edh], are single letters). The symbols below the vowels represent diacritics.
The right hand column shows first the percentage of vowels. Below this is a table of consonants, order by type, location in the mouth, and voice. The first number is the percentage of these sounds among dwarvish consonants. The second number is a percentage of sound frequency based on a simplified IPA alphabet. The third number measures the dwarvish frequency against the "standard" frequency to determine a specific "sound" of dwarvish. This is all very sketchy, and probably wrong.
The second list shows, in the left columns, the number of times each letter appears at the beginning, within, or at the end of a word (not counting vowels, for some reason: it was a while back that I made these). The right hand column (incomplete) shows percentages of each type, location, and voice being used in frontal, medial, or final positions.
I then, sort of arbitrarily, decided on the basic mechanics of the language. It would be inflected for word properties, such as person or gender, but word usage would come from sentence structure, as in English. Perceiving, as I did, that the dwarves were a people fond of structure and order, their language I assumed would bear similar characteristics (with allowances for poetry and song).
Nouns were to be inflected for number, possession, and possibly gender (undecided at the moment).
Adjectives would inflect as the nouns they modified, and would follow them directly (or perhaps be appended to them).
Verbs would be inflected for tense, person, and number. Voice would be determined by an ablaut. Moods would be determined by particles, placed before the verb.
I will continue work on this, as a personal project for the time being, but I will report any developments here. I am also willing to accept critique and suggestion.