tanmlarn

Tanmlarn is a fictional language used in speculative fiction and world-building communities. It appears in various works as the language of an ancient civilization or as a reconstructed ancestral tongue of a small ethnolinguistic group. Because tanmlarn is a construct shared across multiple, unrelated settings, its features are described with some variation, and there is no single canonical grammar or lexicon.

In many depictions, tanmlarn is presented as an agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb (SOV) word order. Nouns commonly take postposed case markers that indicate number, definiteness, and grammatical role, while adjectives and genitives agree with the nouns they modify. Verbs often encode aspect and mood through affixes rather than internal inflection, and some versions include evidential or epistemic markers to signal how knowledge about a statement was obtained. Phonologically, tanmlarn is typically described as having a modest inventory of stops, fricatives, and nasals, with vowels that may include simple length distinctions or limited pitch features in some adaptations.

The writing system for tanmlarn varies by author: some render it in a syllabary or abugida inspired by pictographic roots, others use a Latin-based transcription with diacritics. In-world texts range from ritual hymns and legal codes to epic chronicles and genealogies, often highlighting the culture’s relationship to language, memory, and ritual practice. In several narratives, modern communities attempt to study, revive, or reinterpret tanmlarn, making it a focal point for linguistic archaeology within the fictional setting.