keelelis

Keelelis is a constructed language created for a fictional universe known as the Keele Chronicles. It functions as the speech of the Keele people and appears across novels, games, and related media. The language was designed to reflect social structures, environment, and cultural norms of its speakers, providing depth to world-building.

Keelelis has five vowel phonemes (a, e, i, o, u) with a length distinction, and a modest consonant inventory including p, t, k, m, n, s, l, r, f, h, and a glottal stop. Stress tends to fall on the penultimate syllable; there is no phonemic tone.

The standard orthography is a Latin-based alphabet with diacritics; a traditional Keeleli script is used in historical manuscripts. Orthography is largely phonemic, with digraphs such as ch and sh and diacritics marking vowel length.

Keelelis is primarily analytic with agglutinative tendencies. It uses postpositional markers for case and function, and its basic word order is subject–object–verb (SOV). Nouns are uninflected for gender; adjectives precede nouns; verbs carry suffixes indicating tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality.

Core vocabulary covers daily life and social relations. There are registers from informal to ceremonial, with notable dialectal differences between northern inland varieties and coastal speech. Loanwords from neighboring languages appear in modern Keelelis.

In the Keele universe, Keelelis is used as a lingua franca in trade and administration. In real-world reception, it has an active study community among fans and linguists, with published grammars and phrasebooks.