keetma

Keetma is a constructed language (conlang) developed as a linguistic thought experiment and used in speculative fiction and academic exercises. It was designed to test how an agglutinative morphology can encode tense, aspect, mood, and case within a relatively compact word structure, while maintaining a straightforward syntactic backbone.

Keetma has a vowel inventory of five vowels and a consonant inventory of roughly twenty-two consonants, with a preference for open syllables (CV). Stress is typically on the penultimate syllable. The language is usually written with the Latin alphabet, with diacritics in some descriptions to indicate vowel quality or tone; a compact syllabary is described in some theoretical works.

Keetma uses primarily agglutinative morphology. Nouns inflect for a small set of cases—nominative, accusative, and genitive—and may take determiners. Verbs carry tense and aspect markers as suffixes, while mood and voice are indicated by affixes or infixes. The default word order is subject–verb–object (SVO); modifiers follow the nouns they modify, and adjectives appear with separate agreement marks where applicable.

The lexicon is designed to be extensible, with roots forming through regular derivational processes. An example sentence in Keetma is "Mi kata Keetma," meaning "I speak Keetma." This demonstrates the SVO order and a simple verb root with a present-tense suffix in typical descriptions.

Keetma originated as a teaching tool for typology and phonology, later appearing in online conlang communities and in speculative fiction. It has a small but active group of learners who publish grammars, lexica, and texts to illustrate conlang design principles.