Ljóðsmálið

Ljóðsmálið Ljóðsmálið
Pronounced:	[ljɔu̯ːs.m̥ɔ:.li:]
Species:	Human
Spoken:	Scandinavia
Writing system:	Latin
Genealogy:	Proto-Germanic Old Norse Old West Norse Ljóðsmálið
Typology
Morphological type:	Fusional
Morphosyntactic alignment:	Nominative
Basic word order:	SVO basic
Credits
Creator:	Lumi
Created:	November 4th, 2025

Ljóðsmálið is a North Germanic language, relatively close to Faroese and Icelandic, and like those two it remains relatively conservative, especially in spelling, where it very rarely makes any changes at all.

Etymology

"Ljóðsmálið" is a compound of "ljóð" ("song" or "poem") and "mál" ("language", the "-ið" is the definite ending), thus making it roughing "the language of song", a poetic way of saying "the beautiful language".

Grammar

Syntax

Ljóðsmálið's basic word order is SVO, but this becomes VSO in questions, however, due to inflections, the word order is actually incredibly free.

Despite that freedom, V2 word order is inflexible, so take the following sentences (subject in yellow, verb in blue, object in red):

Mannfjoldinn var 1.500 — The population was 1,500

However (prepositional phrase in green):

Árið 2000 var mannfjoldinn 1.500 — In 2000, the population was 1,500 (lit. The year 2000 was the population 1,500)

But for questions, SV inversion is used, so:

Stefan er svangur — Stefan is hungry

and when turned into a question:

Er Stefan svangur? — Is Stefan hungry?

Questions

As seen above, questions are formed through SV inversion (SVO > VSO), an example being:

Þú talar Ljóðsmálið — You speak Ljóðsmálið

Can be turned into:

Talar þú Ljóðsmálið? — Do you speak Ljóðsmálið?

Inversion is still used even with interrogatives, which are simply placed at the start of the sentence:

• hvat? — what?

Hvað ert (þú) (at) gera? — What are you doing?