kliningan

Kliningan is a fictional language created for speculative fiction and worldbuilding. It is described as the native tongue of the Klining people, who are said to inhabit the archipelago of Klinea in the imagined world where the stories are set. The term serves both as the name of the language and as a shorthand for the linguistic culture associated with it.

In the in-world linguistic profile, Kliningan is presented as an agglutinative language with a primary subject–object–verb (SOV) word order. Nouns are marked for number and case, while verbs encode aspect, mood, and evidentiality through affixes. Pronouns function both as independent words and as clitic attachments. The language is described as having a moderately sized phoneme inventory and a five-vowel system, with typical CV and CVC syllable structures. Some descriptions note features such as reduplication for aspectual nuance and a limited set of stress-based phonological rules.

Writing and orthography are depicted as Latin-based, supplemented by diacritics to indicate vowel quality, tone, or length in certain texts. In-universe manuscripts may also reference alternative scripts used in ceremonial or historical contexts, though the primary reference orthography remains Latin-derived.

Usage and reception within the fictional world include formal education, lexicography, and cultural media. Dictionaries, phrasebooks, and learner grammars are described as part of the Kliningan linguistic ecosystem, and conlang communities in the story world engage in fan linguistics, phonology experiments, and worldbuilding debates surrounding dialectal variation and historical change.