Introduction

Bandalish is my little side project I work on when I'm not busy or reading my Bible. It's important to note that I, being 13 years old, am... not a linguist. So compared to some of the absolutely amazing conlangs on this website, Bandalish may be a bit... underdeveloped.

But I don't really care. This is fun to work on and use occasionally (not that any of my friends understand it), and it just makes me happy.

I thank the Lord for that.

Origins

Bandalish started in Sixth Grade, where one day I had the idea: "What if I made a language?" At the time, the only experience I had with other languages was a little Spanish (because every American knows at least some), and I think only a few words or phrases in German (a language I still study to this day).

It started out as Nitwittian, and it, putting it bluntly, sucked. It had very little effort put into it, so it was basically just English but with different words.

A sample of Nitwittian would be: "Dreyung fre mahle is vere smutaleck," which means "The young man is very smart."

Nitwittian lacked unique traits and vocabulary. And what was unique wasn't very good.

The transition from Nitwittian to Bandalish happened when I discovered German umlauts. It started with Ä. I found it interesting that the two little dots made an A sound like an E. So I added it.

Then there was Ö.

I added that too.

And it basically continued from there, until I added... a lot of diacritics. But back then it wasn't as "bad" as it is now. I also started to incorporate more German-sounding words into the language, but at the same time, because of a lack of a formal dictionary, I forgot a lot of the original Nitwittian vocabulary (also I admit, I was using ChatGPT to make words). So the words changed and it looked much closer to how it does now.

But then I observed the language looked too much like English. I didn't like that. So how did I fix that?

Remove every ounce of visible English roots until all of it is completely unintelligible.

But I wasn't done. The rest was pretty much all the improvements mentioned before, but they all happened over a long period of time until all the differences were amplified, and now we had a unique language with its own rules and vocabulary.

"Bandalish"

A much better name than Nitwittian.

The Alphabet Explained for Confused English Speakers

The letters are scary. Yes, I know. It's supposed to be, in a way.

Bandalish, when using the Latin alphabet, has 34 letters. Every letter in English (minus Q and X), plus ten extra. But the letters that you may think you know the sounds of function a bit differently.

For example, the letter A cannot make the sound it does in English "cat." That sound would be made by Æ. C does not sound like S or K, but rather like "ch" in "church." Everything else is pretty much the same though

As for the extra letters, well, here you go:

Ä sounds like E in English "bed." The letter E in Bandalish makes a similar sound but it's less open

Æ, like mentioned earlier, sounds like A in English "cat." Or like Ä does in Finnish.

Ë sounds like I in English "big."

Ï doesn't actually make a unique sound, but it's used because Bandalish has diphthongs like "ei" that make a unique sound. If the event were to occur where I shows up next to E but they're pronounced separately, you would show this by using Ï instead of I.

Ǩ sounds like... well, there are a lot of examples. It sounds like "ch" in German words like "Bach," "Acht," or "Machen" or like it does in every Scottish Gaelic word I've seen that has it. It sounds like כ in Hebrew or Yiddish. Like խ in Armenian... (If any of that's incorrect I apologize)

Ö kind of sounds like I in English "bird" or U in "yogurt"

Š sounds like Sh in "ship"

Ü sounds like U in French, which is like saying "eeh" with rounded lips

Ž sounds like S in English "measure" or the Cyrillic letter Ж

Þ sounds like Th in English "thought" (Note: Bandalish doesn't have the Voiced Dental Fricative, AKA Th like in "The." Bandalish only has the Voiceless Dental Fricative)

Word Order

Bandalish word order is mostly the same as English word order, but there are a few differences.

1. Adjectives go before the noun AND the article, both definite and indefinite (Putting it simply: It goes before the words for "the" and "a/an"). Example: Ekv frö luit (The same person)

2. The words "mey" and "don" go after the noun they describe. Example: "önkar mey" (My friend)

Extra Notes

Everything on this website is actually a Romanization, Bandalish's native script is Dalic. Unfortunately, Dalic is mostly confined to paper, so I can't get it onto a computer, much less onto LingoCon. I will say though, Dalic works much better than Latin for Bandalish so it's disappointing that I can't display it here.

Bandalish intentionally lacks some terms. So if you can't find something in the dictionary, the most likely reason is because I haven't added it yet... but there's a possibility I haven't added it on purpose.

Adding on to the previous note: I am nowhere near finished with the dictionary yet.

The dictionary also includes some fictional terms like Nitwittia, Wyland, Naktiin, Tokura, Meepish, Könne, etc... These are part of the lore for Bandalish, which I might explain in a different document.