nsansä

Nsansä is a fictional language and cultural tradition appearing in world-building works and tabletop role-playing materials. It is described as the language of the Nsansa, an imagined ethnic group in a continental setting. The term also refers to the associated script and the body of oral and written literature composed in the language.

Etymology: The name nsansä is said to derive from the Nsansa word for voice or speech. The orthography uses modified vowels with diacritics to mark tone and long vowels.

Linguistic features: In canonical descriptions, nsansä is an agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb tendency, and it employs evidentiality marking. Nouns exhibit classificatory prefixes; verbs use aspect and mood suffixes; demonstratives and kinship terms influence sentence structure. It has stress on penultimate syllables in most dialects.

Phonology and writing: The language is described as having a inventory of plosives, fricatives, and nasals, with vowels that may contrast by length. Tone is referenced in some sources as scalar or pitch-based. The nsansä script is an alphabet with diacritics and ligatures; it preserves word-initial consonants and can mark vowel harmony in certain dialects. Some texts are also transcribed with phonetic notation in scholarly editions.

Cultural context: The language is central to oral storytelling, ritual chants, and traditional education within the narrative world. It is studied by fictional linguists and preserved by cultural institutes in the setting. In modern adaptations, nsansä appears in maps, glossaries, and language-learning materials for fans.