olhavas

Olhavas is a constructed language and the cultural corpus associated with the fictional Olhava people, widely used in world-building, speculative fiction, and tabletop role-playing. It is not attested as a natural language outside of these contexts.

In the fictional setting, Olhavas is spoken in the central highlands of the continent of Valara, with regional varieties in river valleys and desert oases. The language functions within a cultural system that emphasizes oral storytelling, ceremonial speech, and caravan trade.

Phonology and grammar: Olhavas is described as an agglutinative language with a basic subject–verb–object word order and extensive affixation for tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality. Nouns show number and definiteness; adjectives typically follow nouns. Verbs can incorporate multiple affixes and participate in serialisation. The phoneme inventory includes consonants p, t, k, m, n, s, l, r, h and vowels a, e, i, o, u; stress is often on the penultimate syllable. The writing system originated as a local syllabary and has been adapted to a Latin-based alphabet in modern texts.

Cultural role and reception: Within its fictional world, Olhavas serves as a core element of identity for the Olhava communities and as a tool for lore-building in games and stories. Linguists in the fiction study it as a living system with evolving dialects, though scholarly material is typically within the narrative universe.