wipian

Wipian is a fictional language developed for use in contemporary fantasy and science fiction settings. It is a constructed language intended to reflect the culture and history of an imagined people known as the Wipians, who inhabit the eastern archipelago of Wipia. The term also appears in world-building and fan encyclopedias as a representative example of a well-documented conlang.

Wipian's phonology includes about fifteen consonants and five vowels, with most syllables ending in a vowel. It is described as agglutinative, using suffixes to mark case, number, tense, aspect, and mood. The basic word order is subject–object–verb, though discourse factors can shift focus and position. Nouns take case endings; pronouns show person and inclusive/exclusive distinctions in the first-person plural.

Morphology features postpositions instead of prepositions. Adjectives generally agree with the nouns they modify in number and case; verbs do not conjugate for person but encode aspect and mood via affixes. There are light evidential markers and a set of monosyllabic function words that help with sentence connections.

Writing system: Wipian uses a syllabary-like script designed to encode CV units; diacritics may be used in some dialects to indicate tone or vowel length. Dialects vary by island group, with regional vocabularies and phonological shifts, though speakers typically understand a standard form used in education within the stories.

In the fiction, Wipian serves as a vehicle for storytelling, governance, and ritual language. In the real world, Wipian has attracted interest from conlang communities, leading to fan dictionaries, texts, and learning resources.