Eihin

Eihin is a fictional language and cultural designation used in world-building for various media and fan projects. It is presented as the language of the Ehin people, who inhabit the central highlands of the imagined continent of Naryon, and it is often tied to Ehin lore, ritual speech, and traditional poetry. In some works, Eihin also names the corresponding cultural group and its historical identity.

Linguistically, Eihin is described as an agglutinative, subject–object–verb language. It features a relatively small phoneme inventory with consonant clusters and a set of vowel sounds; stress is syllable-based. Grammar relies on suffixal morphology to express tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality, while nouns take postpositional markers rather than articles. Word order is generally SOV, and postpositions mark spatial and other relations. The language distinguishes animacy and definiteness through demonstratives and numeral classifiers in certain dialects.

Writing and transmission: Eihin is said to have historically used a syllabary linked to runic motifs; modern fiction often presents an adapted alphabet with diacritics for clarity. There are several dialects, notably Northern Eihin and Southern Eihin, with lexical differences and phonetic shifts, though mutual intelligibility is typically maintained. Ehin poetry and ceremonial speech are frequently cited as distinct registers within the lore.

Reception and usage: Eihin appears in novels, role-playing games, and encyclopedic compendia within its fictional setting. Linguists and fans have produced grammars, phrasebooks, and learning resources as part of enworld-building communities. The in-world status of Eihin may change across works, reflecting shifts in culture, politics, and contact with neighboring languages.