Ilmaisii

Ilmaisii is a fictional constructed language created for linguistic exploration, creative media, and educational projects. It is not a natural language and exists primarily within collaborative conlang communities, academic demonstrations, and speculative fiction contexts.

Origin and name

The term ilmaisii was coined by participants in a multi‑disciplinary project to study expressive modalities in communication. The name is a stylized surrogate meant to evoke expression and meaning, with the double i serving as a distinctive trademark within the conlang practice.

Phonology

Ilmaisii has a compact phoneme inventory: consonants p, t, k, m, n, s, l, r, h and vowels a, e, i, o, u. The language uses stress on the penultimate syllable and treats vowel length as phonemic, typically indicated in orthography by a macron or double vowel. There are no phonemic tones.

Morphology and syntax

Ilmaisii is primarily agglutinative, attaching suffixes to nouns and verbs to indicate number, case, aspect, mood, and evidential stance. Nouns are marked for nominative, ergative, accusative, and genitive relations; adjectives generally follow nouns and agree in number. Verbs carry aspectual and modal information through affixes and employ auxiliary particles to express evidential meaning. The basic word order is subject–object–verb (SOV), though topic‑comment structure and fronting are common in discourse. The language emphasizes expressive nuance through morphosyntactic markers rather than a large root lexicon.

Writing system

Ilmaisii uses a Latin-based script with diacritics to denote vowel length and some palatalization features. Optional logograms or ideophonic marks appear in creative or pedagogical materials to capture expressive nuances. Academic work often provides a phonemic transcription separate from standard orthography.

Usage and reception

Within conlang and speculative fiction circles, ilmaisii serves as a testbed for morphology, syntax, and expressive grammar. It is discussed as a case study in artificial language design, with emphasis on how form encodes communicative nuance rather than on naturalistic representativeness.