noursei

Noursei is a fictional constructed language developed for a collaborative world-building project and featured in several science fiction narratives. It is presented as a fully realized language with its own sound system, grammar, and writing tradition, designed to lend depth to the imagined culture of its speakers.

Its phonology centers on a modest inventory of vowels and consonants arranged for primarily syllable-timed pronunciation. The writing system, known as the Noursei script, is a syllabary-like alphabet in which characters typically represent CV units; a Latin transliteration is also used in scholarly material about the language.

Grammatically, Noursei follows a subject–object–verb order and relies on affixation to mark grammatical distinctions. Nouns carry case markers to indicate roles in a sentence, and verbs encode aspect, mood, and evidentiality through suffix sequences. Adjectives generally precede the nouns they modify, and demonstratives align with noun phrases rather than agreeing with verbs.

Lexicon mirrors the world’s ecology and social structures, including terms for kinship, agriculture, technology, and ceremonial life. In the fiction, scholars and linguists study Noursei to understand how deliberate language design can reflect cultural values and historical development.

Within the narrative universe, Noursei has gained attention as a notable example of constructed language craft, informing world-building practices and contributing to debates on naturalism versus intentionality in conlang creation.