enën

Enön is a term used in speculative linguistics and language-creation communities to designate a class of morphemes that encode the speaker’s stance toward the addressee and the social relationship between participants. In many conlangs, enön elements function as bound morphemes that attach to verbs or pronouns and interact with tense, aspect, or mood to convey politeness, solidarity, or formality beyond the core lexical meaning.

Origin and etymology: Enön is a coined term in English-language conlang discourse; its exact roots are fictional and vary by creator. The diacritic on the o is used in some representations to indicate a closed front rounded vowel common in conlangs and to distinguish enön from near-homophones in natural languages.

Morphology and usage: In practice, enön morphemes are often short suffixes or clitics that attach to verbs or pronouns. They can co-occur with tense and aspect markers, requiring adjustments in vowel harmony or consonant assignment within a given conlang's phonology.

Examples: from published worldbuilding or conlang texts include: tu enön-kaa lak, “you (polite, intimate) speak”; mi enön-pao shan, “I greet you with deference.” These examples illustrate how enön supplies social meaning alongside the propositional content.

See also: conlang, pragmatics, mood and modality, worldbuilding. Note: There is no single authoritative definition for enön; its meaning and form vary by project and author.