Gnomic Language Family

 

The languages in this family were originally spoken in Golanicja, and with a few exceptions, seem to remain localized there. These languages all seem to have evolved from the Ancient Gnomic and Ancient Giant languages of the First Epoch.

Ancient Gnomic (before Year -5000)

The dead language of the Ancient Gnomes, written and spoken during the First Epoch. While scholars have been able to connect elements of this language to modern languages, texts from this period are largely indecipherable, and there have been no living speakers in thousands of years.

Ancient Giant (before Year -5000)

The dead language of the Ancient Giants, written and spoken during the First Epoch. Very few samples of written Ancient Giant have ever been discovered, and the written form of the language seems to be heavily influenced by Ancient Gnomic. It is suggested that Ancient Giant may originally have been only a spoken language, and that the Ancient Giants were taught writing by the Ancient Gnomes.

Early Gnolnic Dialects (Year -4000 to Year -1300)

This group of potentially several dozen dead languages are lost to history, believed to have been spoken in Golanicja and possibly Obersk during the Second Epoch, prior to the re-emergence of writing. Very little is known about the dialects that existed between the disappearance of the Ancient Gnomic and Giant languages and the appearance of Old Gnolnic, though many diverse examples of Old Gnolnic writing suggest the existence of a protolanguage that gave rise to it, which would have been a creole of several of these languages.

Gnosip (unknown to current)

Gnosip is unusual in that it is an almost entirely species-specific patois, spoken exclusively by Gnomes. Because Gnomes tend to live isolated from the rest of society, their language is not much impacted by broader societal movements that put pressures on languages. Some Gnome scholars who have studied Gnosip and the Gnomic language family believe that spoken Gnosip might be quite similar to Ancient Gnomic. Written Gnosip, however, is spectacularly strange, in that it has tended throughout history to steal the writing system of the broader culture in which a given family or society of gnomes are living, and to use its characters to create a new, phonetic version of the written language.

Golonog ( Year -1800 to current)

Golonog is a sub-family of languages that includes perhaps two hundred different dialects spoken primarily by orcs, tuckers and goblins. It is said there are as many dialects of Golonog as there are mines - and it is true that the language grew out of a number of mining towns in the Iron Ridge Mountains probably as early as the Ash Winter. The language became extremely wide-spread during the Orcish Conquests, when a written language borrowing the alphabet and pronunciations of Middle Goljanic was created to support it. During the Orcish Conquests, it became the de facto global language for over a hundred years. The language is now spoken in some form or another by nomadic tribes of raiders all around the globe, with new dialects constantly emerging as tribes or clans merge or conquer one another. Due to its wide-spread history in mining operations, Golonog also remains a common second language in many places where mining is central to the economy, and it features a sophisticated vocabulary and grammar for facilitating accurate description of three dimensional spaces, such as underground caves and tunnels.

Old Obersk (Year -1500 to Year -1100)

The language spoken in Obersch seems to have branched from the other languages in the family very early, before the re-emergence of writing. The earliest written examples of Old Obersk come from the beginning of the Third Epoch, but the logography used is totally different from the alphabet of Old Gnolnic, suggesting they were invented independently. Old Obersk was slow to spread, and several different dialects were active at the same time. By the time of the Orcish Conquests there were at least a dozen different dialects being spoken across the continent, all sharing a similar written form, but with significant differences in their vocabularies and grammar.

Old Gnolnic (Year -1300 to Year -400)

Old Gnolnic first began to be written in several different places across Golanicja at around the same time, at the beginning of the Third Epoch. The earliest existing Golanicjan writings found suggest the language came together as a creole of many other spoken dialects, cohering into a single language fairly quickly as the knowledge and practice of writing spread across the continent. As the language established itself, in the first half of the Third Epoch, it began to split geographically into two distinct languages; one spoken in the north and one spoken predominantly in the south.

Middle Goljanic and Middle Odovicjan (Year -500 to Year 400)

These two closely related languages diverged from Old Gnolnic in the middle part of the Third Epoch. Both were very successful, and became the clearly dominant languages in their respective regions, north and south of the Southwall Ridge. As societies expanded and complexified, these languages firmly entrenched themselves, becoming the official languages of virtually every city, on the Continent. They continued to evolve separately, with both persisting through the Orcish Conquests until the founding of the founding of the Dwarven Kingdom of Golanicja.

Kralj Golanicjan (Year 384 to Year 1200)

Prior to the beginning of the Orcish Conquests the Upper Classes of Golanicja were speaking a somewhat affected regional variant of Middle Goljanic. This is the version of the language that was spoken by Torbjorn Kostevic, who lead the rebellion our of the Iron Ridge Mountains to retake Golanicja. In 384, after Torbjorn I was named King of Golanicja, he declared Kralj Golanicja - literally ‘the King’s Golanicjan’ - to be the official language of the Dwarven Kingdom - suppressing the use of Middle Odovicjan in the south. All official records in Golanicja would be kept in Kralj Golanicjan for the next eight hundred years, from the end of the Third Epoch until the Kingdom was dissolved at the end of the Imperial Era in the Fourth Epoch and individual Charter Cities were again free to choose their own official languages.

Kiniginobersk (Year 404 to current)

With the Orcish Conquests, there rose a need for the population of Obersch to mobilize for war. This was difficult given the many regional dialects of Old Obersk that were in use at the time, and the armies of Obersch were slow to mobilize and inefficient. To improve their efficiency, the Obersch War Council adopted the dialect of Old Obersk that was used in the region around Great Glacier Lake as the official language of the military command. With the signing of the Treaty of Gojod in the early fifth century, and the formation of the monarchy under Matriarch Eisfaust, one of her first acts was to make Kiniginobersk the official written and spoken language of the nation state of Obersch. By the beginning of the Imperial Era, the populations of the cities of most of the continent had largely shifted to speaking Kiniginobersk, but uptake in the rural areas was slower. The same relative slowness to change meant that once it had fully established itself into the rural and more remote areas of the continent toward the late Imperial Era, it cemented itself quite strongly. Along with a few minor new dialects, Kiniginobersk remains the principle language in Obersch into the Fifth Epoch and beyond.

Golanicjan (Year 1200 to current)

Golanicjan is a more colloquial, informal version of Kralj Golanicjan that was adopted by the vast majority of Charter Cities in Golanicja following the dissolution of the Kingdom of Golanicja. Kralj Golanicjan had grown overly elaborate, affected and cumbersome due to institutional controls that had been imposed on the language for hundreds of years, and the dissolution of the Kingdom allowed for the language most people were speaking on a day to day basis to become the their official language once again.

Odovicjan (Year 1200 to current)

Although Middle Odovicjan was suppressed in the Kingdom of Golanicja, it did not stop people from speaking it. However, hundreds of years of suppression puts a lot of pressure on a language, and it can change a lot in that context. The language adapted heavily during the Orcish Conquests by borrowing from Golonog, and adapted again in the Imperial Era by borrowing heavily from Imperial Comercja. Thus the modern Odovicjan language - which was adopted by many Charter Cities below the Southwall Ridge after the dissolution of the Kingdom of Golanicja - is extremely different from both Middle Odovicjan and modern Golanicjan.