jargona

Jargona is a fictional constructed language created for world-building in science fiction and fantasy media. In its in-universe setting, it functions as the common speech of a merchant culture that travels between starports and frontier settlements across a vast imagined region.

Jargona is described as an agglutinative language with extensive affixation marking tense, aspect, mood, case, evidentiality, and politeness. The phonology includes a moderate inventory of consonants with a distinction between stops and fricatives, and a five-vowel system. Word order is typically subject–object–verb, and modifiers generally follow the nouns they describe. Some texts describe vowel harmony and consonant alternations as phonological features.

The writing system uses an alphabet of 26 to 28 letters, with diacritics to indicate vowel quality and tonal or aspectual nuance in some variants. In older in-universe documents, a runic or syllabic script is shown alongside the alphabet in ceremonial contexts.

Jargona reportedly emerged from a pidgin used by traders and navigators, later standardized by scholars and scribes within the fictional world. It appears in official records, literature, and dialogue in various media tied to the setting, serving as a lingua franca among diverse communities.

Outside the fictional setting, Jargona has an active fan community that builds grammars, dictionaries, and pronunciation guides. It is studied as a construct for linguistic creativity and world-building, with no native speaker community and no official canonical grammar beyond what creators publish.