Albic

The Albic language family constitutes the main conlanging project of Jörg Rhiemeier. They are a family of languages spoken in the British Isles and the Canary Islands in the League of Lost Languages. Old Albic was the dominant language of Britain before the immigration of the Celts; its speakers, the British Elves, were the bearers of a unique ancient civilization which gave rise to the Celtic and Germanic traditions of Elves, the Greek tradition of Hyperborea and possibly also of the Atlantis myth. They were essentially humans who behaved pretty much like the Elves of J. R. R. Tolkien (whose languages were influential on the creation of the Albic languages). The modern Albic languages (Low Elvish, Caledonian, Iverinian and Macaronesian) are spoken by tiny minorities; they descend from various vernacular dialects of Old Albic.

Three branches of the Albic family can be distiguished: South Albic, consisting of Classical Old Albic, Low Elvish and Macaronesian; North Albic, represented by Caledonian; and West Albic, to which belongs Iverinian.

The Albic languages seem to be distantly related to Indo-European and share a number of features (such as VSO word order and initial mutations) with the Celtic languages of the British Isles as well as with the Pictic family; these three families thus form a linguistic area (see this article for details). The Albic languages are active-stative languages of the fluid-S subtype; other interesting features include autosegmental behaviour of vowel features (leading to various umlaut and vowel harmony phenomena), marking of degrees of volition by various noun cases, and suffixaufnahme (i.e., possessors agree with the possessee in number and case in addition to their own number and case marking).

Sketch of Old Albic

I posted this sketch of Old Albic on June 21, 2004, to the CONLANG mailing list.

• Phonology
• Nominal Morphology
• Verbal Morphology
• Syntax

Old Albic texts

• Babel Text
• Am talal am ñgohama ara am henam (from the 10th Conlang Translation Relay)