zmny

Zmny is a constructed language (conlang) created by linguist Mara Voss in the early 2010s for research into regular grammar and affixal morphology, as well as for speculative-fiction projects. The name and lexicon are designed to be nontransparent to existing natural languages, while maintaining learnable regular patterns. Zmny has a primarily SOV (subject–object–verb) sentence order and an agglutinative morphology. Nouns take suffixal case markers to indicate nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, locative, and instrumental roles. Verbs encode tense and aspect through affixes and suppletive forms; there is a small system of mood markers and evidentiality. The language relies on vowel harmony; phonology consists of about 22 consonants and five vowels, with stress generally falling on the penultimate syllable.

The writing system, known as the zmny script, is a compact syllabary-like script with about 32 characters, designed to be easy to handwrite and to reflect the language’s phonotactics. A romanization is commonly used in descriptions and online texts.

Zmny has a modest speaker base, primarily among conlang enthusiasts and scholars. Documentation includes a reference grammar, a learners’ course, and a bilingual dictionary. While not associated with any nation or community, zmny has a small but active presence in online forums, collaborative world-building projects, and speculative-fiction writings. Research on zmny has contributed to discussions of regular grammar design and conlang pedagogy.