ettiinden

Ettiinden is a constructed language developed for worldbuilding and speculative fiction. It is designed to illustrate how linguistic systems can encode social relationships and cultural concepts. In its fictional setting, Ettiinden is spoken by communities on a chain of islands and in coastal towns.

Classification and grammar: Ettiinden is an agglutinative, subject–object–verb (SOV) language with rich case marking and mood-aspect suffixes. Nouns inflect for number and case; adjectives agree in number. Verbs carry person, tense, aspect, mood, and evidential information. Word order is flexible due to rich morphology, but the default order is SOV.

Phonology and writing: Phonology includes a inventory of stops, fricatives, nasals, and liquids; vowels a, e, i, o, u with phonemic length distinctions in some dialects. Stress is penultimate or variable by word. Orthography uses a Latin-based alphabet with diacritics to mark vowel quality and tone in some texts; an older fictional script called the Ettiinden script is described in lore.

Usage and reception: Ettiinden has multiple dialects within its fictional world; there are resources such as grammars, dictionaries, and sample texts published within the worldbuilding project. It is used in literature and role-playing materials to convey cultural nuance, such as honorific systems and kinship terms encoded morphologically.