tilojensa

Tilojensa is a constructed language created for a fictional world, spoken by the Tilojens, a maritime people inhabiting a coastal archipelago in the southern sea. It is presented in world-building materials and speculative fiction as the cultural and communicative backbone of the Tilojen panorama.

Linguistic profile. Tilojensa is described as predominantly analytic with limited agglutinative tendencies. The basic word order is subject–verb–object in simple clauses, and adjectives generally follow nouns. Noun phrases use prepositions rather than extensive case marking, while verbs encode tense, aspect, and mood through affixes and auxiliary particles. Pronouns distinguish inclusive and exclusive forms in the first-person plural, a feature highlighted in social interactions across the fictional culture.

Phonology and writing. The language features a modest phoneme inventory: five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and a set of consonants that includes p, t, k, m, n, s, l, r, h. It has no phonemic tone, and stress typically falls on the penultimate syllable in disyllabic words. In most academic and literary editions, Tilojensa is written with a Latin-based alphabet, with diacritics used in some editions to indicate vowel length or phonemic nuance.

History and usage. Within the fiction, Tilojensa emerges from an oral tradition and later develops into a written form through contact with neighboring languages in the archipelago. It serves as a marker of identity and is central to maritime storytelling, navigation lore, and ceremonial speech in the Tilojen culture. Scholarly notes on Tilojensa appear in companion volumes and world-building guides accompanying the fiction.