Language and Identity
Language in Eryndor marks culture, profession, geography, and history. A traveler’s speech may reveal where they learned, which roads they traveled, which institutions they trust, and which stories shaped them.
Translation
Translation is rarely exact. Some languages encode distinctions others do not. Sylvan often relies on image and rhythm. High Axiomatic favors explicitly defined relationships. Old Vale Speech contains unusually specific vocabulary for absence, inherited memory, and recognition without prior experience.
Language Glitches
Near active instability, language may behave incorrectly. Words may be replaced, repeated, understood by people who should not know them, or translated into a tongue no listener recognizes.
Most glitches are temporary. A few are not.
Known Languages
Open the individual entries below for cultural notes, sound, grammar, writing conventions, and example expressions.
Archive Entries
Common is the most widely shared spoken language in Eryndor. Merchants, travelers, officials, adventurers, and city residents use it when no more specific language is shared. It is practical rather than ceremonial, but its flexibility allows it to carry everything from market gossip to legal debate.
Open entry → SylvanSylvan is spoken by many fey beings and by mortals whose lives have been shaped by fey roads, courts, songs, or bargains. It treats emotion as information rather than ornament.
Open entry → ElvishElvish is a living language with deep historical roots. It is used for ordinary conversation, scholarship, songs, magical practice, family histories, and the naming of places.
Open entry → DwarvishDwarvish developed among communities where architecture, mining, craft, and collective obligation were matters of survival. It excels at describing material properties and responsibility.
Open entry → DraconicDraconic is associated with dragons, old magical traditions, and foundational arcane scholarship. Its grammar allows complex magical relationships to be stated with unusual precision.
Open entry → OrcishOrcish developed across mobile communities, border settlements, military traditions, and cultures where spoken memory mattered more than permanent archives.
Open entry → Deep SpeechDeep Speech is associated with beings, spaces, and forms of thought that do not organize experience the way most mortal minds do.
Open entry → InfernalInfernal is built for obligation. Its vocabulary distinguishes permission, consent, surrender, debt, ownership, service, witness, and consequence with unnerving precision.
Open entry → CelestialCelestial is used by divine beings, sacred traditions, and mortals trained in religious scholarship or invocation.
Open entry → Primordial Open entry → Primordial (Aquan)Aquan is the water-aspected form of Primordial. It is spoken by water-aligned elementals and by communities shaped by rivers, coasts, islands, tides, and deep water.
Open entry → Primordial (Auran)Auran is the air-aspected form of Primordial. It is spoken by air elementals and cultures tied to high places, open skies, wind travel, or weather.
Open entry → Undercommon Open entry → Gnomish Open entry → Primordial (Terran)Terran is the earth-aspected form of Primordial. It is spoken by earth elementals and people shaped by stone, deep places, mineral craft, and old foundations.
Open entry → Giant Open entry → Primordial (Ignan)Ignan is the fire-aspected form of Primordial. It is spoken by fire elementals and traditions centered on forge, hearth, sun, volcanic power, purification, or transformation.
Open entry → UndercommonUndercommon is a network language rather than a single centralized tongue. It developed among underground communities, hidden routes, displaced peoples, travelers, and traders.
Open entry → GnomishGnomish is built for making, explaining, revising, and arguing productively. It has a large technical vocabulary and an even larger supply of compounds.
Open entry → GiantGiant is the language of giantkind, old sagas, territorial declarations, ancestral memory, and formal power.
Open entry →