APO-L v1.0 — Affective Phonetic Overlay Language

Human vocalization carries affective information that precedes semantics, structure, and propositional meaning. Infants, distressed adults, music, and spontaneous speech all express states such as urgency, vulnerability, tension, and release through phonetic shape rather than through words. Despite this, most linguistic and computational frameworks treat phonetics as either decorative or subordinate to meaning. This note introduces APO-L (Affective Phonetic Overlay Language): a minimal proto-language that formalizes affective signal encoding using phonetic features alone, without assigning semantic content, causality, or structural meaning. APO-L is explicitly designed as a pre-semantic signal layer, intended to inform reflection and regulation in larger systems, not to determine truth or action. The contribution is structural and descriptive only; no algorithms, implementations, or prescriptive uses are proposed