Fiendish: A Delve into Conlang

As a general rule of thumb, especially in fiction, artificial languages are unnecessary. The audience's limited exposure can rarely tell whether you put something together in a day with basic rules or spent a decade painstakingly constructing a new language down to incorporating historical borrowings and vowel shifts. This isn't to say you shouldn't put any thought into your constructed language, because zero effort conlang can be random and jarring. Something internally consistent and about a level deeper than what the audience will interact with is sufficient to make your fantasy language look superficially complete.

It is from that mindset that I am now doing conlang with the vulgar tongue of demons. This is a language spoken by fiendish inhabitants that possess many of the same morphological traits of humans as it pertains to communication; lips, tongue, a perception of time following the arrow of entropy, etc. Deal-making is also a major facet of their culture. Beyond this, I'm not planning on any deeper world-building of demonic culture, since I plan on this being applicable for multiple settings that use the above archetype.

Grammar

Fiendish sentence structure is Subject - Object - Verb. English follows SVO. An example of SVO is "Sam ate oranges," while SOV is "Sam oranges ate."

Grammatical Case

Fiendish conjugates its vocabulary pretty heavily. Objects aren't so much "gendered" as they are informing of the financial/hierarchical relationship. The object of a sentence is conjugated based on its relationship with the subject of the sentence, while the subject of the sentence is conjugated based on its relationship to the speaker. In the right context, this same conjunction is used in the ablative & allative cases (generally "wish to sell" & "wish to procure," respectively). As a good rule of thumb, apply the appropriate suffix to any noun. Appending -way or -ai to someone's name is an excellent way of indicating that the speaker is used to speaking in the tongue of demons.

-una  Neuter
-way  Lender, Seller, Owner, Allative
-ai  Debtor, Buyer, Owned, Ablative
-wan  Instrumental (tool)
-kuna-  plural

Subject Pronouns

First person subject pronouns (I, we) are generally not voiced, and are presumed when no other subject pronouns are used in the sentence.
Qan-  2nd person subject pronoun (you)
Pay-  3rd person subject pronoun (they)

Verb Tenses

Same principle as above. Take the verb and append it appropriately based on the tense. Fiendish cares about whether reporting of a past event is first or second-hand information (third+ hand is grouped here).
-ni  present
-chu  present (negative)
-sqani  past (reported)
-rqani  past (experienced)
-man  past (negative; would have)
-saq  future
-chik-  plural (allies)
-chi-  plural (minions)

Verbs

T'urpu-  to stab
Mikhu-  to consume (and add to yourself)
Lik’i-  to consume (without adding to yourself)
Impuwistu-  to invoice
Khuya-  to love
Qunqu-  to forget
Iñi-  to believe, accept as true

Nouns

sach'a (perennial), saca  large woody plant
-micun  food-bearing (temptation; eg apple)
-hamp  food-bearing (protective; eg oak)
q'illay  kanina coin
qullqi  price
asnu  gullible fool
michi  goblin

Sample Sentence

Qanai t'urpusaq  I will stab you (vengeful connotation)
Michikunauna asnuai mikhuchiksqani  Goblins ate, from what I know, the moron.

General Phrases

Haykai’k-[case]  Welcome!
Maypi [noun]?  Where is the [noun]?
Yanapayk-[case]!  Help! (-ai gives connotations of "my kingdom for a horse!", -una is more typical, -way is more prideful/assertive)
Wuynas diyas-[case]  Good morning!

Chu No. Adding grammatical case is only when being formal, especially in transactional context.