stengiasi

Stengiasi is a constructed language developed for linguistic experimentation and worldbuilding. It is commonly described in conlang communities as a deliberately engineered system designed to explore features such as agglutination, vowel harmony, and evidential mood. In real-world use, stengiasi remains a fictional artifact with no native speaker community.

Name and origin: The term "stengiasi" is a self-contained label created within a fictional world. The language is associated with the Stengian family, a group imagined by authors and game designers to illustrate cultural and linguistic diversity. It is presented as one of several related languages in the worldbuilding project.

Phonology: Stengiasi has a five-vowel inventory [a e i o u] with a modest set of consonants including p, t, k, s, m, n, l, r and a glottal stop. The language exhibits vowel harmony across suffixes, with suffix vowels harmonizing to the root vowel. Stress tends to be penultimate, with marked contrastive stress on longer roots.

Grammar: The language is largely agglutinative and primarily SOV in basic order. Nouns inflect for number and a case system with nominative and oblique cases; adjectives agree in number. Verbs mark aspect, mood, and evidentiality; there are postpositions rather than prepositions. Question formation relies on a sentence-final particle.

Writing and usage: Stengiasi is typically rendered in a Latin-based orthography with diacritics to reflect phonemic distinctions. In fiction, it appears in dialogue, lore, and lexicons within novels, role-playing games, and fan grammars. It is studied by hobbyist linguists as an example of conlang design.