zaoonego

Zaoonego is a constructed language designed for speculative fiction and collaborative world-building. It provides a linguistic framework for imagined cultures and is used in novels, role-playing games, and fan-created glossaries. The language was created to explore themes of communication, identity, and social hierarchy within its fictional world.

Zaoonego features a relatively small phoneme inventory, including consonants p, t, k, m, n, s, l, r and vowels a, e, i, o, u. It is predominantly agglutinative, attaching a series of suffixes to stems to mark tense, aspect, mood, number, definiteness, and evidentiality. The basic sentence structure is subject–object–verb, with adjectives following nouns and demonstratives preceding nouns. Noun phrases include markers for definiteness and possession, while verbs encode information about the speaker’s stance and source of knowledge through affixes rather than changes in agreement with subject or object.

Zaoonego uses a syllabic or syllabary-like writing system, the Zao Script, in which most characters correspond to a syllable (CV or CVC). A Latin-based romanization is commonly used for learning materials and interlanguage communication. The writing system supports diacritics to indicate tone or stress in some dialects.

In-fiction, Zaoonego reflects social relations, regional dialects, and the evolution of the culture that speaks it. Several dialects exist across regions, with mutually intelligible forms yet distinct vocabulary and pronunciation. The language continues to grow as new words are coined to reflect technological and social change.