[4] In an interview, Sotomayor stated that she aimed for Kēlen to be naturalistic apart from its verblessness, and that to achieve this she employs the principle "change one thing and keep everything else the same".
[5] In its concultural setting, Kēlen is spoken by an alien species called the Kēleñi, for whom the language was created.
It is mentioned prominently by Sarah L. Higley in her book Hildegard of Bingen's Unknown Language: An edition, translation and discussion (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), The New Middle Ages ISBN 1-4039-7673-2, ISBN 978-1-4039-7673-4) where she discusses Lingua Ignota in the context of constructed languages up to the present day.
She also says that "fellow conlangers consider Kēlen to be efficient, elegant, strange and innovative, and its writing system is greatly admired."
Peterson explains that while its experimental structure is in many ways similar to an engineered language, the amount of linguistic and concultural detail given by Sotomayor (including inflection of the relationals, three different scripts, and information on Kēleñi culture and society such as a calendar and a method of divination) make it a fully-fledged artistic project rather than a simple experiment.
"[8] In addition, all sonorants, except /ʎ/, can be geminated, as follows: mm /mː/, nn /nː/, ññ /ɲː/, ŋŋ /ŋː/, ll /lː/, rr /rː/.
Kēlen has the same five monophthongs as in Spanish, with the addition of vowel length and diphthongs making it similar to the system found in Hawaiian.
[13] Personal pronouns in Kēlen have singular, dual, paucal, and plural forms, as well as distinctions of clusivity in the first-person.
Le, ri, and ma can all be used as reduced forms of the singular, dual, and paucal of their corresponding full-length personal pronouns.
Kēlen makes extensive use of a system of animacy, with a set of mandatory prefixes on all noun stems, the usage of which depends upon the speaker's view of what they are talking about.
[2] She describes these on her site with examples of the potential uses of each within the context of larger sentences, with the abbreviation "NP" for "Noun Phrase".