IPtölu

IPtölu is a constructed language (conlang) designed as a testbed for multilingual communication and naturalistic syntax within online communities. The project behind IPtölu describes the language as a flexible, morphology-driven system intended to facilitate both human communication and natural language processing experiments. It emerged in collaborative online fora in the early 2000s and has since evolved through community contributions, documentation, and periodic revisions.

Phonology and writing are based on a Latin orthography with diacritics. The vowel inventory includes five standard vowels plus three front-rounded vowels (ä, ö, ü) to express distinctions in quality and length. Diacritics mark vowel quality and length, while stress typically falls on the penultimate syllable. IPtölu is primarily suffixal and agglutinative: nouns take case and number markers, while verbs encode tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality through affixes. The basic word order is subject–object–verb, with postpositions rather than prepositions.

Lexicon and usage: The vocabulary draws on a mix of European and non-European roots, augmented by systematic neologisms. The language supports inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns, polite versus informal forms, and a modest system of politeness markers. IPtölu has found use in language-learning materials, computational linguistics experiments, and fictional world-building, but remains a niche auxiliary language rather than a widely adopted lingua franca.

See also: constructed languages, language planning, and examples of conlangs used for NLP experiments.