Archive of Our Own ^beta

This is the various conlang dialogue Carl Buck and I translated for Paramount+'s Halo, a TV series adaptation of the well-known game series. Sangheili, the language featured in the show, is a language spoken by the Sangheili, as well as generally inside the Covenant, an alien alliance that worships the Halo Array. The language is a lightly inflectional head-final language with distinctive vowel length and ejectives. The language was co-created by myself and Carl—a project which started three years prior (almost to the day) to the series premiere.

Sangheili uses Standard American Romanization. Ejective consonants are written with a following apostrophe, and the r is the tap [ɾ]. The language has long vowels, represented by a doubled vowel, and occasionally has geminates, also written doubly. Likely the most challenging aspect of the phonology are the consonants with a velar release. These are written as if they began with a consonant cluster, but they occur at every point of articulation—namely, pkh [pˣ], tkh [tˣ], kkh [kˣ], and qkh [qˣ], and even the fricative (or fricative-ending) consonants skh [sˣ], shkh [ʃˣ], and chkh [tʃˣ].