Sventish

Sventish is a constructed language created for a fictional world. It is depicted as the native tongue of the Sventari, a seafaring people who inhabit a chain of islands in the northern archipelago of Valenor. The language is a central element of the setting’s lore, appearing in oral folklore, ceremonial poetry, and contemporary fiction within the story universe. In-universe scholars study its structure to understand historical contact with neighboring language groups.

Phonology: Sventish has a modest sound inventory, with around 21 consonants and five vowels. It allows syllables of the forms CV and CVC, with occasional CCV clusters. Stress is typically on the penultimate syllable. The consonant system includes a voiced-voiceless pair and a limited set of sibilants, and vowel harmony influences suffix vowels in some word families.

Grammar: It is largely analytic with a basic SVO word order. Verb forms encode aspect and mood through agglutinative suffixes. Nouns show number through suffixes and may mark definiteness. Pronouns distinguish inclusive and exclusive first-person plural, and demonstratives encode distance relative to the referent.

Writing and usage: The primary script is a runic-inspired alphabet used for monuments and ceremonial texts; a Latin transcription is common in modern learning materials. Sventish remains a living language within the fiction, taught in schools of the Sventari diaspora and preserved by community storytellers, though it exists alongside neighboring languages in bilingual contexts.