Arlish
Arlish is a constructed language (conlang) developed for a fictional maritime culture by linguist Mara Klein, first published in 2012 as part of the Arlish Project. It aims to combine naturalism with learnability, offering consistent morphology and a relatively small, thematically maritime lexicon. In the fiction setting, Arlish serves as the everyday tongue of coastal communities and as a vehicle for worldbuilding details such as social form and epistemic nuance.
Phonology includes five vowel phonemes and twelve consonants, with stress typically falling on the penultimate syllable.
Arlish follows a largely analytic syntax with a default subject–verb–object (SVO) order. Verbs mark tense, aspect,
Its vocabulary draws on maritime imagery and natural phenomena, with many roots imagined to be ancient borrowings