Jelï

Jelï is a constructed language created for speculative fiction and world-building, described as the native tongue of the Jel people who inhabit the Jelï Archipelago, a chain of islands in the northern reaches of the Lethon Sea. It is presented in most sources as part of a broader cultural milieu that includes seafaring, oral storytelling, and coastal trade.

The name jelï is said to derive from a Proto-Jel root meaning "to bind" or "to connect," with the diaeresis over the final i indicating a distinct phoneme in the language’s orthography. The language is often treated as having a strong cultural identity tied to navigation and communal memory.

Phonology in Jelï features a consonant inventory of about fourteen sounds and a vowel system of seven vowels that participate in vowel harmony across suffixes. The system includes a set of sonorants and fricatives that differentiate front and back articulation, with phonemic length marked in some historical stages of the language within in-world texts.

Grammar is predominantly agglutinative and follows a subject–object–verb order. Nouns bear case markers to indicate grammatical role, while verbs carry suffixes that encode evidential mood, aspect, and tense. The language makes a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns, and it uses postpositions rather than prepositions.

Writing in Jelï relies on the Lir script, a syllabary used to record common texts and inscriptions. Scholarly romanization is common in academic contexts. There are regional dialects, with northern Jal and southern Kïl varieties showing lexical differences but retaining mutual intelligibility.

As of the contemporary period within its fictional setting, Jelï is considered endangered, with a few thousand fluent speakers, mainly older adults, and ongoing revival efforts in education and media to promote intergenerational transmission.