somethingan

Somethingan is a hypothetical language family commonly used as a teaching and demonstration tool in linguistics and constructed language communities. It is not attested as a real-world language.

The name combines the English word something with the suffix -an, following a convention for labeling fictional language groups. This naming signals a placeholder origin and is intended to keep the example generic and neutral for instructional use.

Somethingan is described as an agglutinative, SOV language. Nouns mark number and case with suffixes; verbs encode aspect, mood, evidentiality, and subject–object agreement. Adjectives follow nouns; possessives and demonstratives attach as suffixes. It often features vowel harmony and a moderate consonant inventory including p, t, k, m, n, s, l, r. Word order is flexible but default SOV; postpositions rather than prepositions are common. There is no fixed noun class system in the canonical description, though dialects may vary. Pronouns are independent and clitics handle evidentiality.

The phonology typically includes vowels a, e, i, o, u with limited contrasts; consonants include p, t, k, m, n, s, l, r and a small set of sonorants. The writing system is Latin-based in most descriptions, with diacritics to reflect phonemic distinctions; standardized orthography is discussed in learner materials.

Somethingan originated as a pedagogical construct in late 20th-century or early 1990s linguistics coursework. It has since been adopted by conlang communities as a test-bed for typology, providing example texts and exercises for students and hobbyists exploring language structure.