andfari

Andfari is a fictional language family used in speculative fiction and world-building to explore linguistic diversity. It is imagined as originating on a chain of coastal islands in the northern archipelago of Andaria and is often employed as a case study in constructing culturally distinct speakers and social dynamics.

Etymology: The name Andfari is a constructed label, combining elements created for the fiction and lacking direct attestation in real languages. Within its internal lore, proto-Andfari evolved from contact among island communities and neighboring language groups.

Linguistic features: In the canonical sketches, Andfari is described as primarily agglutinative with verb serialization and a subject–object–verb base order. It makes use of evidential markers, a modest nominal case system, and vowel harmony in most word forms. The phoneme inventory is described as mid-weight, favoring sonorants and a small set of fricatives. The writing system is often portrayed as a locally developed syllabary or alphabet with diacritics.

Cultural and scholarly use: Andfari serves as a modular backdrop for storytelling and game design, enabling world-builders to demonstrate language contact, borrowing, and language shift. While discussed by fans and some writers, it has no independent real-world attestation and remains a fictional construct.

See also: constructed language, world-building, linguistic typology.