Elkarîl
| Elkarîl | |
| Spoken in: | Elcarin Mountains |
| Timeline/Universe: | Almea |
| Total speakers: | ca. 20 million |
| Genealogical classification: | Elcari-Murtani
|
| Basic word order: | VOS |
| Morphological type: | agglutinating |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | sui generis |
| Created by: | |
| Mark Rosenfelder | 2002 |
Elkarîl is a conlang created by Mark Rosenfelder as part of his conworld Almea. It is spoken by the elcari, a sapient race in some ways similar to Dwarves of other fantasy worlds (they are shorter in growth than humans, settle in mountain ranges, and their economy is chiefly based on mining and metalworking).
Elkarîl has several features that set it off from human languages of both Earth and Almea. Its diachronic development is very slow. The language has changed very little during the last 15,000 years; this is probably due to the long lifespan (more than 300 years) of the elcari, among whom children are few and far between and thus socialize more with adults than with other children of similar age. Also, the elcari revere their language as a gift from their creator god, Khemthu-Nôr, which means that any change to the language is considered disrespectful to their divine creator. Another unusual feature of Elkarîl is that it makes some use of graded signs, especially in the domain of adjectives, wherein a gradual change of phonetic form entails a gradual change in meaning. The language also does not use personal pronouns; instead, it has a set of assignable variables.
The language has a unique writing system, consisting of face-like glyphs whose features represent the sounds of the language.
