dallohen

Dallohen is a constructed language (conlang) developed for the fictional Dallo Archipelago in the fantasy world of Ardent Seas. Created by linguist Mara Kalen in 2012 as part of a worldbuilding project, Dallohen is designed to be a naturalistic language with its own phonology, grammar, and writing system. The name reflects the archipelago’s name and a suffix meaning speech in the fictional language family.

Dallohen is typologically agglutinative and primarily subject–object–verb (SOV) in basic order. Nouns distinguish case and number, with affixes marking definiteness and demonstratives. Verbs encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice through a network of affixes and clitics. The language exhibits vowel harmony and a modest phoneme inventory, including five vowels and a compact set of consonants. Stress is commonly penultimate, though the system allows for expressive emphasis.

The script is Latin-based, featuring digraphs for several sounds and diacritic marks to indicate vowel harmony and stress in didactic materials. Spelling aims for phonemic correspondence, with consistent rules for syllable structure and permissible consonant clusters.

Dallohen has a growing corpus of texts, including fiction, translations, and role-playing game materials. It is taught online through courses, dictionaries, and grammar guides and is supported by a small but active fan and learner community that contributes readings, pronunciation recordings, and bilingual glossaries.