fictionalneolographic

Fictionalneolographic is an adjective used to describe vocabulary, naming practices, and lexical systems created for fictional worlds. The term denotes both the design craft of generating new words and the in-text deployment of those words to convey culture, technology, and history within a narrative.

Practitioners study and apply fictionalneolographic techniques to achieve plausibility and depth. Core concerns include phonotactics (sound patterns), morphology (word formation), etymology (word origins within the world), semantics (meaning and connotation), and orthography (spelling conventions). Beyond individual lexemes, fictionalneolographic work often includes systematic lexicons, semantic fields for specific communities, and rules governing loanwords and semantic shift over time.

In worldbuilding and speculative fiction, fictionalneolographic devices serve communication, characterization, and social signaling. Names of peoples, places, technologies, rituals, and artifacts are crafted to reflect history and power relations. Consistency checks, in-world glossaries, and cross-referenced dictionaries help maintain internal coherence and ease translation or localization.

While closely related to constructed languages (conlangs), fictionalneolographic emphasis is typically broader and more pragmatic, focusing on usable vocabulary within stories rather than complete language codification. The term is used mainly in writing guides, fan linguistics discussions, and some scholarly analyses of linguistic creativity in fiction.

See also: conlang, worldbuilding, linguistics of fictional languages.