SEASPEAK

Firstly, if you know basic linguistics, here's a brief overview of the language structure! Type: Agglutinative Syllable Structure: (C)V(V) Main word order: Subject-Object-Oblique-Verb. "Mary opened the door with a key" turns into “Mary the door key-with opened.” Adjective order: Adjectives are positioned before the noun; “black-cat” Adposition: rather than prepositions, postpositions; “the dog the cat yard-across chased”; “keys table-on” Questions: sentence final particles (see below) and slow rise in pitch over utterance Negation: uses particle do before main noun phrase and na before the final verb Articles: definite article e “the”; absence of article indicates indefiniteness If you're not a linguist, that's absolutely fine; either look for your answer below or in the audio, and if you can't find it there, feel free to tweet me @tolkienelf on Twitter using the hashtag #numeneralanguage or the Tweet button at the bottom of the page!

No. It does, however, share many features in common with natural human languages found in the world. This is intentional! It was my hope to create a language that would seem realistic, assuming that if there are humans in the very distant future, their ability to perform language will be similar to ways it has been. I used World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) data (https://wals.info) to ensure that I was choosing realistic features for my language, as well as reading a TON of wikipedia articles on languages with similar structure, i.e. Subject-Object-Verb sentence order and agglutinative. Some of these languages were: Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, Maori, and Inuktitut.

Fun! I wanted to play a character in my game whose first or second language was not English. The timing was also right; I took a class in fall semester 2018 whose purpose was to create a conlang for credit. Yes, really. Someday I'll create my own fictional universe and tangle of constructed languages a la Tolkien, but while I'm busy in school, I've borrowed the world of the lovely people at Monte Cook Games as a backdrop for my first full-scale conlang. Plus now other people will want to see my language! :)

In the game world, this is one of many languages spoken in the Rayskel Cays. The game materials only mention Ayon pidgin, which is the trade language of a diverse people who speak many languages natively. I have taken liberties with that idea and created a tribe of people, the Seaspeakers, and their language. I wrote more about my vision of these people here.

See the handy video above for an overview of the sounds of Seaspeak! Also, if you want a sound chart to refer to, here's the phonetic inventory in IPA.

The majority of Seaspeakers are illiterate, and those who can read or write most likely borrow a writing system from a different language. I may expand on this later, but for now all writing conventions are designed for player use in-game. I have chosen to represent the sounds of Seaspeak thusly: It was my stylistic choice to represent long/stressed vowels with a macron. You can get this on Apple devices by pressing and holding the desired vowel and selecting the one with a macron. If you can't do this on your device, it's totally acceptable to use a rising accent marker (áéíóú), which is ALT+e and the vowel on my keyboard.

I've done my best to simplify my explanations wherever possible, but if you see something you don't understand, here are a couple links to some resources, and as always, feel free to ask me on Twitter. Intro PDF Intro YouTube