Oteota

Oteota is a fictional language family developed for worldbuilding in speculative fiction and tabletop role-playing games. In the imagined world, oteota is spoken by communities across the Oteota Archipelago, though dialects vary by island and clan. The term also refers to the associated cultural practices of storytelling, ceremonial speech, and intergroup negotiation within that world.

Linguistic features of oteota are described as agglutinative, with extensive suffix marking for tense, mood, evidentiality, and case. The core word order is subject–object–verb, and the language uses postpositions rather than prepositions. Pronouns encode clusivity and hierarchy, influencing verb agreement and honorific forms.

Phonology includes a modest consonant inventory of p, t, k, s, m, n, r, l and vowels a, e, i, o, u. Stress is often antepenultimate, and tone is not phonemic in the core dialects. The language allows consonant-vowel sequences but generally avoids complex consonant clusters.

Historically, oteota emerges in the archipelago's mythic history and later spreads through trade routes and inter-island marriage networks. It survives in ceremonial chants, genealogies, and official decrees, with ritual speech playing a central role in governance and festivals.

In modern worldbuilding communities, oteota is used as a case study in conlang design, illustrating how social structure can shape grammar and vocabulary. It appears in fan grammars and RPG sourcebooks as an example of a fully realized fictional language.