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. The language uses a Latin-based alphabet with diacritics to mark vowel length and stress; a compact, optional syllable-based orthography is sometimes used in fan resources. A separate pictographic script appears in some in-universe artifacts but is not standard.

Arlish follows a largely analytic syntax with a default subject–verb–object (SVO) order. Verbs mark tense, aspect, and evidential stance through suffixes, while nouns take postpositional markers to indicate case roles such as agent, patient, and location. Adjectives usually follow the nouns they modify, and determiners are optional. The pronoun system distinguishes number and agreement with verbs.

Its vocabulary draws on maritime imagery and natural phenomena, with many roots imagined to be ancient borrowings from neighboring languages in the fiction. Because Arlish is a constructed language, learning resources exist primarily in fan communities and the official project site, including grammar summaries, word lists, and example texts. It remains a niche interest within conlang circles.