piipas

Piipas is a fictional constructed language created for linguistic experimentation and hobbyist conlang communities. It was developed in the 2010s as a project to illustrate how agglutinative morphology, vowel harmony, and a structured syllable inventory can combine within a mostly analytic grammar. The name Piipas is used in texts and grammars produced by its community and is not associated with any natural language.

Phonology and writing

- Vowels: five basic vowels (a, e, i, o, u) with limited nasalization in suffixes.

- Consonants: a small set including p, t, k, s, m, n, l, r, with optional glottal stop.

- Orthography: Latin-based alphabet with diacritics used to mark vowel length and stress; tone is not phonemic in Piipas.

Grammar

- Word order: primarily subject–object–verb (SOV), but allows flexible ordering in subordinate clauses.

- Morphology: predominantly agglutinative; suffixes encode person, number, case, tense, aspect, mood.

- Case and agreement: nominative-accusative alignment; adjectives agree in number.

- Verbal system: aspect markers indicate completed vs ongoing actions; evidential markers show source of knowledge.

- Pronouns: clitics that attach to the verb or the preceding word.

History and usage

Piipas originated in online conlang circles as a collaborative effort. A community maintains documentation, grammar sketches, and sample texts. The language has no official native speakers but is used in language-learning materials and as a testbed for phonology and morphology experiments.