Languages

The Conflagration marked a new beginning to all things, and by Divine wrath so was the ancient language that once unified the world confounded into diverse tongues as exist today. The common language you know is that of Andover, but it is only one of many. Key to understanding the world around you is to understand its people, and you can only do that if you are able to speak to them.

Andoverish

This is the most commonly-spoken language in the known world, centred on the kingdom of Andover. It was once dominant in Carlia when the two crowns were united, but despite its steady decline - especially in elite circles - many common people speak Andoverish for the purposes of business, and typically along the border it is spoken in the home as well. Even before they were brought under the hegemony of the Dover kings, the Dales also curiously spoke some pidgin variety of Andoverish, though the more remote regions of the Dales and its mountain valleys have their own, vastly different language known as Dael.

Andoverish is a slow language, with many idioms, many stops and pauses, and a smattering of consonants and vowels. It is also highly regional, with one's particular dialect a clear indicator of social class and regional background. However, all these dialects are mutually intelligible - and, with its marked similarity to some ancient Glostrian texts, some scholars suggest that Andoverish itself originally emerged in the wake of the Conflagration as a dialect of the universal Glostrian language.

Wisman's Tongue

The most obscure and specialised dialect of Andoverish, 'Wisman's Tongue' is the name given to the underground language of Andover and Carlia: derived from Andoverish but completely unintelligible to those outside its social bounds, the Wisman's Tongue is the collective jargon of criminals, charlatans, prostitutes, smugglers, and black marketeers - in other words, those rejected by and living in rejection of mainstream society, whose very existence is an offense against the state. By choice or by misfortune the speakers of the Wisman's Tongue are people who live within the underground society of Andover, and the Tongue itself acts as a way for such people to identify one another and to live their lives without running afoul of the authorities. Though the Wisman's Tongue only exists in a spoken form, those who understand it also know the many signs and markings associated with it, used to communicate to fellow pariahs areas of interest, dangerous places, locations where arrests have been made, neighbourhoods sympathetic to them, and places where a murder has been committed.

Trenchspeak

A much more open dialect than the Wisman's Tongue, the particular argot known as Trenchspeak is a confusing mix of Andoverish, Carlian, Lusitanan, and even obscure scraps of ancient Glostrian. It is, ostensibly, a way for rank-and-file soldiers to speak to one another in the trenches without their superiors understanding their meaning. Though it is largely a Dover phenomenon, it has spread among some in the Carlian military as well, and is very popular among mercenaries as many are former soldiers and deserters. Because of the heroic, hard-working image of soldiers in the Dover public imagination, some aspects of trenchspeak have been co-opted by ordinary Dovers who think it is cool and exciting. The soldiers themselves, seeing their cryptic dialect being exposed, are quick to come up with new words and new meanings, often from rhymes, random associations, Lusitanan sailing songs, and ancient Glostrian words etched in artifacts dug up in the process of entrenching. In this way trenchspeak is able to constantly evolve itself, acting as a surefire way to separate true soldiers from fakes, officers, and long-retired veterans.

Carlian

The prestigious language of art, science, and high culture in Carlia, the Carlian tongue is an ascendant one in the present century. One of the more famous sparks of the Isian Uprising of 821 was a decree that required all academic and administrative publications be made first in Andoverish and then translated into Carlian; a legion of artists, scholars, aristocrats, and even lawyers protested and marched on Regent House, the local seat of government, echoed elsewhere by a broad swath of disaffected people unhappy with the status quo. Since then in independent Carlia the situation has reversed, and language and culture both have flourished. The book publishing industry in Carlia vastly outstrips that of Andover, and it is commonly said that the reason why Carlia is not a wealthy and mercantile nation like Cambra is because Carlians use books as currency. Even peasants in Carlia can read at least at a basic level, taught by their parents or local schoolhouses, and every household has a bookshelf with a selection of national and regional literature.

Though reading Carlian is measured and romantic like a dance, the spoken language is rapid and betrays little of the careful beauty of the written word. Carlian words and sentences are often long and seemingly cumbersome to outsiders, but locals wrap their tongues around them with no trouble at all. Still, due to their intertwined history Carlian and Andoverish have a fair amount of overlapping vocabulary, and Carlian is considered the easiest second language for a native Dover to pick up.

Some Carlians have Andoverish names, but typical local Carlian names include Albrecht, Adalbert, Diamant, Friedrich, Ifan, Maximilian, Siegert, Triegmund, and Tristan for men, and Adalisa, Augustina, Annerose, Hannah, Lyse, Mari, Sarah, Topaz, and Ula for women. Carlian surnames tend to come from one's family village - which can make some aristocratic names particularly archaic - creation such surnames as "af Tamesis," "af Brugge," "av Hochburg," "av Steinfurt," or "av Horstmar." The af/av distinction is regional; "af" is used in southern Carlian dialects, while "av" features in northern Carlian dialects, such as in Cayem, making it de facto official.

Cambran

The language, in short, of money. As Cambra functions as the hub of trade from Carlia all the way to Lusitana, everyone who lives in the major cities of this world has at some point or another heard Cambran. It is written on their money, it is the blood of their contracts, and it is the oil that lubricates business around the White Bay and beyond. Cambran is best known for its elegant cursive, whereas Andoverish and Carlian are standardised based on machine print. It is spoken as quickly as Carlian often is, with very short, flowing phrases that seem, to the Andoverish ear, to communicate an incredible amount of information for how few sounds they use. Cambran literature, however, is not very well-known outside the city itself and its hinterland; the people of Cambra have a rich culture of poetic chansons but are mostly known for their paintings, sculpture, and architecture.

Common Cambran names include Aalf, Azore, Jan, Jehan, Loys, Medart, and Sansson for men, and Annette, Amante, Loisa, Paris, Tresme, and Zoe for women. Cambran surnames are almost exclusively occupation- or location-based, such as Marchandiere ("border-dweller") or Massion ("stonemason").

Dael

Once unknown in Andover proper and rarely heard even in the northern reaches of Carlia, Dael is the language of the Dalefolk who have migrated south in recent decades. No one knows how many variations or accents it has, but all Dalefolk understand one another easily despite differences in vocabulary and pronunciation. It developed in scattered villages in the mountain valleys and in coastal hamlets across the Salt Strait from Mercy. There is no written form of Dael - it simply was never needed - but some Dover scholars have attempted to create a script for it based on the same ancient Glostrian letters used by Andoverish today. Few if any Dalefolk use it in practise, however, as they have little need. Dael is a language of poems and songs, with long vowels and long consonants, and grammatically it is a highly synthetic language - that is, individual words are modified and added onto in order to change meaning or grammatical form. The most well-known Dael word in Andoverish is savotte, the word for a communal logging camp, adopted through the regular contact of Dover lumberjacks with Dael shepherds and woodsmen. Though Dovers simply say savottes in any case, the proper Dael plural for savotte is savotta, and a person who resides within a savotte is a savotteyn. Confusingly, while in Dael a group of two to three loggers would be called savotteyna, four or more loggers are referred to as tynaakki. So far, among Dovers only scholars, rangers, and loggers ever learn more than a few words in Dael.

While many Dalefolk have taken up Andoverish names in order to better integrate themselves into this new society, many Dael names, which are traditionally unisex, remain. These names include Emry, Guin, Eyra, Morhen, Ilmari, Tappi, Kalev, Marin, Anni, Mered, Rowen, and Idrys. Dalefolk do not have surnames as Dovers and Carlians do, and instead use patronymics in the form of -mab (for sons) and -tytar (for daughters), such as Ilmaristytar or Meredmab.

Lusitanan

The Lusitanan language is well-known to sailors off the coast of Andover in the Great Sea. Inveterate pirates, Lusitanans are immediately recognisable from their loud, rhythmic shanties, the first and last sign that you are about to be boarded. As very few Lusitanans interact with Andover or Cambra as anything other than pirates little is known about their language, but from salvaged ships' logs it evidently has a written form in a script similar to Cambran: flowing and well-inked with fine pens, not printed. However, sailors from up the Salt Strait who spent long enough in Lusitanan captivity have claimed their language is remarkably similar to Dael. Spoken Lusitanan, apparently, has a sing-song quality, sentences flowing up and down like waves crashing against the shore.

Captured pirates have given them names as Afonsien, Artur, Dariel, Roi, and Uxien among men, and Aldara, Antiela, Brantsa, Rosalia, and Sabiel among women. No surnames have yet been recorded.

Ancient Glostrian

The mysterious language from the time of the Conflagration, ancient Glostrian still survives in its alphabet, which has been passed down over the centuries in some form or another to become the script used to print both Andoverish and Carlian. Ancient Glostrian is found almost exclusively in the form of inscriptions with no body of literature as of yet uncovered. It is, in fact, not actually known if there was a "Glostrian people" who spoke this language - as is the ruling hypothesis today - or if it existed purely for writing, a theory becoming steadily more popular in the Carlian academies. Even the most dedicated scholars of ancient Glostrian have only vague, often fanciful ideas of how it was spoken, and many agree that it must not have been spoken in the form we know it and that a separate verbal language existed at the time but has been lost. One theory published recently out of St. Aloysius University in Andover holds that the early Andoverish language evolved not from this hypothesised spoken Glostrian but from an attempt by early humans after the Conflagration to pronounce the signs and letters they saw scattered across the world around them. The wildest conjecture, however, comes from a popular paper by an engineer at Redland Technical claiming that the shallow depth at which so many ancient Glostrian inscriptions have been found in battlefield trenches indicates that either the Conflagration was much more recent than popularly believed, or - the engineer's personal conclusion - that there was a relict population of Glostrians who survived the aftermath of the Conflagration and can be found living today in some unexplored corner of the world.