Wordissa

Wordissa is a constructed language created to study language design and facilitate international online communication. It emphasizes regular grammar, explicit morphology, and simple phonotactics. The language was developed by the Wordissa Initiative, established in 2010, with a public draft released in 2012 and ongoing updates by an international committee.

Phonology and writing system: Wordissa has five vowel sounds and about twenty consonants; syllable structure is typically CV or CVC; stress falls on the penultimate syllable. The orthography uses a Latin-based alphabet with a one-to-one phoneme correspondence and minimal use of diacritics.

Grammar and syntax: Wordissa is agglutinative, using suffixes to mark tense, aspect, mood, number, and case. The basic word order is subject–verb–object; adjectives follow nouns. Pronouns distinguish inclusive and exclusive forms in the first person, and definite articles exist. Prepositions are generally expressed through postpositional phrases, contributing to a relatively uniform syntactic surface.

Lexicon and word formation: Core vocabulary draws on common Romance and Slavic roots, ensuring recognizability for learners of related languages. Word formation relies on productive derivational and inflectional affixes, enabling the creation of new terms with predictable patterns.

Usage and status: Wordissa is not an official language and has no native-speaking community; it is taught and studied as a second language within academic and hobbyist circles. Resources include a reference grammar, dictionaries, and parallel corpora to support linguistic research and multilingual communication.

See also: constructed language, conlang, Esperanto, Lojban.