Aholini

Aholini is a fictional ethnolinguistic group and their language, created for worldbuilding and speculative fiction. The term and its associated culture are widely used in conworlding communities and language-creation projects, and they are not attested in historical records.

In commonly circulated descriptions, the Aholini inhabit a coastal archipelago in the southern seas. Their economy centers on fishing, navigation, and interisland trade. Social organization emphasizes kinship, collective decision making, and customary law. Some renderings portray matrilineal lines and elder councils, while others describe egalitarian networks with rotating leadership; details vary by author and project.

Aholini linguistics are typically described as agglutinative, with a subject–object–verb word order and postpositions. Noun morphology marks case and number, while verbs receive affixes for tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality. The phonology usually includes a consonant inventory with a glottal stop, five vowels, and a preference for simpler consonant clusters. The language is often accompanied by a writing system that may be syllabic or alphabetic, depending on the source. Some treatments emphasize a rich oral tradition of storytelling and poetry that supplements the written form.

Aholini has become a common example in discussions of constructed languages and worldbuilding. It is used to illustrate how culture, geography, and language interact in speculative settings, and it serves as a case study for conlangers in outlining sound systems, syntax, and writing.