APO-L v1.0 - Affective Phonetic Overlay Language

Human vocal expression conveys affective information—such as urgency, tension, vulnerability, and persistence—prior to semantic meaning. These signals appear in infant vocalization, spontaneous speech, distress, and music, yet are rarely formalized as a distinct linguistic layer. When ignored, systems become brittle; when over-interpreted, they become manipulative or unstable. This paper introduces APO-L (Affective Phonetic Overlay Language) v1.0, a frozen specification of a pre-semantic proto-language that encodes affective signal using phonetic features alone, without assigning meaning, intent, truth, or authority. APO-L is explicitly constrained to a non-authoritative, reflection-only role within governed systems. The contribution is architectural and definitional, not algorithmic. No claims are made regarding emotion detection, psychology, or behavior shaping.