Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/July 2009

Kēlen is a constructed language created by Sylvia Sotomayor. It is possibly one of the most thorough attempts to create a truly alien language. It violates a key linguistic universal &mdash; namely that all human languages have verbs. In Kēlen, relationships between the noun phrases making up the sentence are expressed by one of four relationals. Despite this, Kēlen is an expressive and intelligible language; texts written in Kēlen have been translated into other languages by several people other than the creator of the language, as may be seen here. In this interview Sotomayor states that she aims for Kēlen to be naturalistic apart from its verblessness, and that to achieve this she employs the principle "change one thing and keep everything else the same".

In its concultural setting, Kēlen is spoken by an alien species (the Kēleñi). Find out more...