kumoudu

Kumoudu is a fictional language created for worldbuilding and storytelling purposes. In the imagined setting, it is spoken by the Kumoudu, an ethnolinguistic group living on the island archipelago of Kumara in the Veridian Sea. The language is described as having distinctive features that have made it popular among conlang enthusiasts: an agglutinative morphology, a subject–object–verb word order, and vowel harmony across morphemes.

Phonology of Kumoudu includes a balanced inventory of stops, nasals, fricatives, and liquids. Consonants commonly cited are p, t, k, b, d, g; m, n, ŋ; s, z, h; l, r; w, j. The vowel system consists of five vowels: a, e, i, o, u, with limited vowel harmony affecting suffix vowels. Syllables are typically CV or C(V), and there are usually no more than two consonants in onset clusters.

Grammar is described as primarily agglutinative, with extensive suffixing that marks tense, aspect, mood, voice, case, and number. Nouns inflect for case (nominative, accusative, genitive) and number, while verbs encode information via chains of suffixes. Modifiers follow or accompany heads, and relative clauses precede the nouns they modify.

Writing systems for Kumoudu include an alphabet derived from the Latin script, with diacritics to mark vowel quality and length. Some ceremonial or fan-produced texts also utilize a syllabary variant. In the fictional world, Kumoudu is used in literature, games, and community projects, and has a small but active learner and author community.

See also: constructed language, conlang, worldbuilding, linguistics.