Kwuŋo, ki lot? Hey, how are you?
Mwaneḷe is my main conlang, my flagship project, and easily the most developed language I’ve made. I started it the last week of November 2018 and developed it over the course of Lexember 2018. I started out with the goal of creating a language with no adpositions and no case marking, in order to push myself out of my comfort zone. I tried to make Mwaneḷe naturalistic. There are a few things about it that I suspect aren’t too naturalistic, but at this point I’m so attached to the language that I won’t change them. I’m happy with soft naturalism.
By way of typological introduction, Mwaneḷe is a very verb-heavy language: it makes heavy use of serial verbs for all sorts of different constructions and it has a fair amount of verb morphology, marking voice, transitivity, TAM, negation, and several kinds of non-finite forms on the verb. It uses SVCs to talk about manner, location and position, results, movement, simultaneous actions, modality, and lots of idiomatic or lexicalized uses. Meanwhile, there’s no real inflection on nouns, no case, gender, or number, just a couple clitics that link noun phrases together. Mwaneḷe tends to be head-initial, and it’s VSO in most cases other than transitive matrix clauses.
Check out below for more Mwane Content!
Where can I find Mwaneḷe?
- A work in progress Mwaneḷe Sketch Grammar: the classic Boasian trio of grammar, texts and lexicon, very much still in progress—I’ll update this link as I put out new versions.
- How to Swear in Mwaneḷe: when people find out I speak another language, they always ask for swear words, so why not start there?
- Segments 01 (02): Mwaneḷe Phonology: for issue 1 of Segments, the r/conlangs magazine, I submitted an article on Mwaneḷe phonology
- Segments 06 (04): Mwaneḷe Typography: for issue 6 of Segments, I wrote about how Mwane script works and talked a bit about my process in creating a font for it.
- Gwu ṇode nu ge de—A Mwane Poem: a short poem I wrote in Mwane, with a translation to English and some discussion, featuring a bit of Mwane script.
- Locations in Mwaneḷe: a post I did as part of a series with some friends about describing position and location in our conlangs. Check out the corresponding posts in Page Allen’s Wistanian, Deer’s Yomori, and Mareck’s Ꞣúufe too!
- Discourse Markers in Mwaneḷe: I wrote a bit about the little particles that show how a sentence fits into a broader context.
- Mwaneḷe Poem: a short little thing that’s been translated into Qɨtec and even English!
- Mwaneḷe makes a guest appearance in William Annis’s talk on Collocations for Lexicon Building at the 2021 dLCC 9.
Just a note: The language is called Mwaneḷe. It’s written in Mwane script. It’s spoken by Mwane people, natively Ŋin Mwane. The adjective for the language is also Mwane. I often abbreviate Mwaneḷe to Mwane, so if you see both forms around, they refer to the same thing!
Di ḍule ḷaxe le! Thanks for reading!