kovái

Kovái is a fictional linguistic and cultural construct created for world-building and speculative fiction. It designates a hypothetical language family and the communities that speak these languages, imagined on the Kovái Archipelago, a chain of tropical islands. It is not a real-world language or people, but a convention used by writers and conworld designers to explore linguistic and cultural ideas.

Linguistic profile within its fictional context describes Kovái languages as largely agglutinative, with subject–object–verb order and a rich system of demonstratives and evidentials. Phonologies commonly feature a mix of consonants with glottal stops and occasional ejectives, and vowel systems that permit harmony across words. The lexicon emphasizes terms related to seafaring, kinship, weather, and seasonal migrations, reflecting the maritime environment of the archipelago.

Writing systems attributed to Kovái in various world-building sources include a semi-syllabary called the Kovái script, designed to encode consonant–vowel pairs, and, in later adaptations, Latin-based orthographies for broader accessibility. In-world literature and oral tradition are said to center on ritual poetry, navigational lore, and tales of island connectivity and isolation.

History and usage in fiction note that the Kovái concept emerged in conworld circles as a tool to study language contact, diffusion, and archipelagic social dynamics. In many narratives, the Kovái-speaking communities are depicted as having a long maritime heritage and a tradition of oral performance that preserves linguistic features across generations.

Status within fictional worlds often portrays Kovái as endangered or in revival, with scholars—also fictional—documenting grammar sketches, producing dictionaries, and developing teaching materials to sustain intergenerational transmission.