Tallfellow

(Under Construction)

Tallfellow (Mambehoblind in Tallfellow, lit. "lip of the people") is a language spoken by the tallfellow halflings of southern Azalia in the Mortal Realm (called Dombellus in the Azalian tongue). A language with a rich history spanning much of the Patchwork, Eldric, and Azalian regions, Tallfellow is the dominant halfling language spoken south of West and East Bellakor, and one of the de facto lingua francas of the entire Patchwork region (rivaled only by Azalian, the dominant human tongue).

Though not the most commonly spoken tongue on Dombellus, Tallfellow is the most fleshed out tongue from that world. (This is probably related to the fact that it has the most speakers in the real world, i.e. me and one of my esnarombind.)

When designing Tallfellow, I wanted it to sound comfortable and familiar to English speakers, since the role of hobbits in Tolkien's fiction was to serve as a sort of everyman that the reader was meant to identify with, and I wanted to capture that feeling in my own halfling language while making it quite different from English in many of its details.

For that reason, Tallfellow has no sounds that don't exist in English (unless you count the prenasalized consonants, but in modern Tallfellow these can't begin a syllable, making the pronunciation trivial). It differs from English mainly by omission of its complexities, as well as by the inclusion of several simple and fairly regular grammatical cases. This had the added benefit of making it quite easy for English speakers to learn.