Elvan is a highly inflected language of nominative-accusative alignment. It is head-initial in inflection, derivation, and syntax. The word order is fairly free, Verb-Initial and Verb-final constructs are equally valid.
The verb inflects firstly for grammatical person, agreeing with the agent/subject in the active voice, and the patient/object in the passive voice. It also inflects for tense after person.
The copula is moderately productive, and has separate forms for Past, Present (unmarked) and Future tenses.
The tense system is fairly straightforward. There is a Past, Present (unmarked), and Future tense, where the past and future tenses are marked with simple affixes.
Elvan has an unmarked Perfective. There is also a Perfect. In addition to this there are two Imperfective aspects, Progressive/Continuous and Habitual, both formed through [a syntactic construction involving a copula, a gerund, and a postposition]
There is an unmarked Active voice and Passive voice marked with an allomorphic suffix. The distinction between the voices is this: In the Active voice, the verb agrees with its Agent with a fusional affix, and the Patient, (alternatively "Object") is a free morpheme. In the Passive voice, the verb agrees with with it's Patient with a fusional affix - and the free morphemes are used for the Agent, which is treated like an Object. This alternation of the verb's agreement introduces an irregularity in the construction of single-argument verbs, since depending on the verb's voice they could be the Agent or Object of a verb. This introduces a morphosyntactical alignment split between a Nominative-Accusative Active voice; and an Ergative-Absolutive Passive voice. All verbs are ambitransitive, they do not require modification or derivation to take extra arguments.
While there is no proper morphological mood in Elvan, the uninflected verb infinitive is used for commands, with a preference to put it verb-initially in this case. Jussive information is conveyed lexically.
Nouns are moderately inflected. A suffix is used for plurality, and suffixes are also used for the case marking. Compounding is frequent, derivational suffixes are readily accepted.
Elvan distinguishes the cases Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, Locative, and Oblique. These are marked on both nouns and pronouns.
There is a singular and plural form for both the Definite and Indefinite article.
Elvan has both free and bound pronouns, and allomorphs of the bound forms. They inflect for number and case, although the forms may be slightly irregular.
Adjectives and Adverbs are conflated entirely in Elvan. They come in three forms, discrete morphemes unto themselves, and those derived from either nouns or verbs. Multiple derivational morphemes can be present. They follow the nouns and verbs that they modify.
Elvan uses prepositions. They immediately precede that to which they relate.