viheil

Viheil is a fictional constructed language created for use in speculative fiction and by language-enthusiast communities. It is depicted as the tongue of the Vihelians, a widespread civilization in a multi-author science-fiction universe. The language appears in in-universe grammars, lexicons, and learning materials that accompany the works, serving as an example of conlang design rather than a real-world language.

Within the fiction, the name Viheil derives from internal morphemes meaning "voice" and "root" or "heritage." The word is used both to refer to the language itself and to its cultural memory.

Viheil is described as an agglutinative language with a predominantly subject–verb–object order. Nouns show no gender, and articles are optional; pronouns include inclusive and exclusive first-person forms. Verbs encode tense and aspect with suffixes, while mood and evidentiality combine suffixes with auxiliary words. The language uses postpositions rather than prepositions. Adjectives typically follow the nouns they modify. The phonology comprises roughly twenty consonants and five vowels, with stress on the penultimate syllable and no phonemic tone. Syllables are usually CV or CV-N, with occasional consonant clusters in loanwords.

Viheil has two described writing systems: a native syllabary used within the in-universe culture and a Latin-based transliteration used in learning materials and external fan resources. The syllabary features rounded shapes and diacritics to indicate vowel harmony and phonation differences.

In-universe use positions Viheil as a lingua franca for diplomacy and education across planets. Real-world readers study Viheil as a typological curiosity, producing dictionaries and grammars; it is not spoken as a natural language outside the fictional setting.