Verbaalin

Verbaalin is a constructed language designed to explore verb-centric grammar and cross-cultural communication. It foregrounds verbs as the primary carriers of meaning, while nominal elements function more as referents or derivations from verbal roots. The canonical word order is verb–subject–object (VSO), but sentence structure is flexible because verbal inflection encodes person, number, tense, aspect, mood, evidentiality, and voice.

Morphology is largely agglutinative. Verbal roots take affixes to express tense (past, present, future), aspect (completed, ongoing), and mood (indicative, subjunctive). A rich system of evidential markers indicates whether information is witnessed, inferred, or reported. Transitivity is encoded in the verb through agreement affixes, and noun phrases can be bare or modified by denominal verbs that derive nouns from verb roots. Some dialects of Verbaalin employ split-ergativity, with alignment that shifts depending on aspect or mood.

Phonology features a modest consonant inventory and five vowels. Syllables typically conform to CV or CVC patterns, with stress commonly falling on the root syllable. The language uses a Latin-based alphabet augmented by diacritics to indicate evidentiality and aspect when needed.

Orthography and literacy tools in Verbaalin emphasize morphology over lexical memorization; readers derive much of the meaning from verb forms rather than isolated nouns. Verbaalin has been used in linguistic simulations and speculative fiction to illustrate how a language with a strong verbal orientation shapes cognition, discourse, and pedagogy. It remains primarily of interest to conlang communities and academic exercises in typology and computational parsing.