laenub

Laenub is a fictional language family created for speculative fiction and worldbuilding. It comprises the Laenub language and its dialects, spoken on the archipelago of Narai in the western seas of the imagined continent of Valora. In the narratives, Laenub serves as a vehicle for maritime storytelling, ritual poetry, and inter-island diplomacy. The language is described as evolving through contact with neighboring languages and through seafaring trade networks.

The name Laenub is a constructed term formed from elements in the proto-Laenub lexicon, commonly glossed as "sea" and "light." The earliest attested forms appear in inscriptions attributed to Bronze Age cultures on Narai, with later developments traced through the fictional canon.

Linguistic features: Laenub is described as an agglutinative language with SVO word order in everyday usage, though poetry may allow flexible order. The noun system marks case and number with suffixes, and verbs carry aspect, mood, and evidentiality markers. The phonology includes a set of stops, fricatives, nasals, and liquids, with vowel harmony that aligns front and back vowels in each word.

Writing system: The primary script is Nalun, an abugida in which consonants carry inherent vowels and diacritics modify vowels. In-world texts range from stone inscriptions to bark manuscripts and modern transcriptions in the Latin alphabet.

Usage and culture: Laenub plays a central role in education, ritual life, and storytelling within the fictional world. Regional dialects vary in formality and lexicon, while loanwords from neighboring tongues reflect long-distance contacts. Scholars in the fiction debate standardization versus preservation of dialect diversity.