laikude

Laikude is a constructed language (conlang) devised by linguist Kaisa Mertanen in 2012 for a project on narrative syntax and second-language acquisition. It is designed to be learnable by speakers of major European languages while offering a flexible system for storytelling.

The name Laikude combines roots meaning "story" and "voice" in the language itself. The core lexicon includes roughly 90 roots with productive derivational affixes and compounding.

The phoneme inventory includes 18 consonants and 5 vowels with a simple syllable structure (CV or CVC). Stress is predominantly on the penultimate syllable. The writing system is Latin-based with diacritics for stress and a few phonemic distinctions, such as /ɟ/ and /x/ represented as dj and kh.

Laikude follows a subject–verb–object word order but uses rich morphology to mark case, number, and evidentiality. Nouns take suffixes for case and number; verbs encode tense, aspect, mood, and evidential source. Pronouns have inclusive and exclusive forms.

The lexicon favors transparent derivation through affixation and compounding, enabling speakers to coin terms for new concepts. Laikude has online resources, learner courses, a dictionary, and example texts.

While not spoken as a native language by a large community, Laikude is used in language-creation circles and linguistic experiments and has been included in several conlang catalogs.