Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/December 2007

The Talossan language (El Glheþ Talossán) is a constructed language created by R. Ben Madison for the micronation he founded, the Kingdom of Talossa. It's also the official language in the other Talossan micronation which split off in 2004, the Republic of Talossa.

Talossan is a constructed Gallo-Romance language, inspired by French and Occitan, and very naturalistic (with quite a few irregularities). In an effort to create a kind of "national mythology" for his micronation, Madison discovered in 1985 that one of the Berber sub-tribes of Morocco was called the Talesinnt, and decided that Talossans were "inexplicably and inextricably connected somehow to Berbers." This resulted in the Talossan language being inspired by Berber languages. More recently however, words are derived from Romance roots and given a French/Provençal feeling to them (some see a Romanian influence as well), but there is no one set of rules for derivation through which every word can be predicted. The word "Talossa" itself is not Romance, but Finno-Ugric in origin: it comes from the Finnish word for "inside the house" (Talossa began in Madison's bedroom.). Find out more...