notesthan

Notesthan is a fictional language and accompanying cultural setting developed for world-building and speculative fiction. It has appeared in several interconnected works and is discussed in online communities dedicated to constructed languages (conlangs). The term refers both to the speech system and to the Notestan people, who in these narratives inhabit a maritime archipelago and interact through trade, ritual, and storytelling.

Linguistic features: Notesthan is described as an agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb base order. It employs vowel harmony across five vowels and a moderate consonant inventory. Nouns show animacy and case marking, with a dual number in addition to singular and plural. Verbs encode aspect, mood, and evidential stance, and pronouns distinguish inclusive and exclusive first person plural. The language favors suffixation and complex nominal phrases.

Writing and phonology: The phonology includes about 20 consonants and 5 vowels, with predictable stress on the penultimate syllable. The writing system is an alphabetic script, augmented with diacritics to mark vowel length and tone in some texts. In some depictions, ideographic symbols accompany the script to represent natural forces or navigation terms.

Cultural context and usage: In the Notestan setting, the language reflects a maritime culture with navigational poetry, ritual speech, and a hierarchy of speech levels for elders, traders, and religious figures. Notesthan serves as a tool for worldbuilding to explore how language encodes social structure, trade networks, and knowledge of the sea.

See also: Constructed language, conlang, worldbuilding, fictional languages.