Kēlen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Kēlen | ||
|---|---|---|
| Created by: | Sylvia Sotomayor | |
| Setting and usage: | alien species (the Kēleñi) | |
| Total speakers: | — | |
| Category (purpose): | constructed language artistic language Kēlen |
|
| Category (sources): | a priori language, consciously rejecting linguistic universals to create an alien language | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | art | |
| ISO 639-3: | — | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
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 — 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.
In its concultural setting, Kēlen is spoken by an alien species (the Kēleñi).
