Far in the future, a group of explorers arrives at a planet inhabited by aliens that resemble trees: Trilaks. They soon discover that Trilaks have an alien communication system (ACS) called Trilakese; some researchers argue that this ACS—more than a simple system—is a fully fledged alien language!

This part of the Trilak Project is a description of such alien language. It is not a grammar in the classical sense of the word because Trilakese is not a language in the classical sense, not even within sci-fi standards. 

Trilakese is special in a few ways, such as:

• It is not a spoken language; it is not a signed language; it is not a written language. Trilakese is a branched language. Meaning is not encoded in sounds, or in hand shapes, or in graphemes or logograms; meaning in Trilakese is encoded in the complex structures that branches make.
• Trilakese violates some structural characteristics of human language: It is not linear—a Trilak can speak multiple utterances in parallel. Trilakese lacks negation; it lacks question words; it doesn’t have thematic roles.
• Trilakese is not categorical. Most content words in human languages are categories (e.g., the word dog is a category that groups all instances of what we understand qualifies as a dog). Trilakese is fluid. Nouns in Trilakese fall into a continuum of meaning in which closer points correspond to closer meanings.
• Trilakese is absurd… at least for us. It expresses things in ways that are very impractical for humans, but make sense for Trilaks.

Despite these unnatural attributes, Trilakese preserves some properties which are often associated with language. For instance:

• Trilakese is a complex communication system: it is difficult to decipher; it cannot be explained in a few words.
• It is systematic: there is a grammar to it.
• It is productive: it can express an infinite number of utterances from a finite number of patterns.
• It has displacement: it can express events outside of the here-and-now such as events from the past and imaginary events.
• It serves different purposes. In a similar fashion that human language does not only transmit information but also serves social and cognitive functions, Trilakese has a social function—more about this later.

To understand how Trilakese works, we first need to understand more precisely what a Trilak is.