Languages of the Rainbow Lands (Patreon)

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The Common Languages

1. High Common (rainbow)
   Status: The upper-class, literary common rainbow-tongue tought by teachers to noble and rich students.
   Writing: yes
   Notes: Old fashioned, unnecessarily complex grammar and pronounciation. Words change depending on context, speaker, intent. Numbers change depending on what is being counted.
2. Vulgar Common (rainbow)
   Status: The trade lingua franca of the non-noble middle-clases and professionals of the Rainbow Land, with distinct regional dialects.
   Writing: for trade
   Notes: Influenced from outer languages. Similar to "city speak" or "gutter talk".
3. Purple Speech (rainbow)
   Status: The dialects of the peasants and laborers of the Purple Land, with many borrowings from the steppe folk.
   Writing: no
   Notes: Very similar to bluenttalk, but it's an insult to say so.
4. Bluenttalk (rainbow)
   Status: The harsh and uncouth dialects of the exiles from the Blue Land and the Wild Folk still living there
   Writing: hell, no!
   Notes: Surprisingly detailed vocabulary of dairy products and aquatic vegetables. Borrowings from Blue Talk.
5. Greenspeak (rainbow)
   Status: The peasant and forester dialects of the Green Land.
   Writing: no
   Notes: Large vocabulary corpus. Speakers from different dialects can mostly understand each other's words even if just by context.
6. Emerald Common (rainbow)
   Status: The vulgar common of Metropolis the Emerald City, with many Elfish and Greenspeak borrowings.
   Writing: yes
   Notes: Beautiful traditional handwriting
7. Decapolitical (rainbow)
   Status: The vulgar common dialects of the Sea Fingers of the Decapolis, popular also with sailors.
   Writing: for trade
   Notes: Very onomatopeic. Short, simple words. It's frequent to understate things. Speakers don't speak much.
8. Saffranian (rainbow)
   Status: The vulgar common of Saffranj and the Yellow Land
   Writing: yes
   Notes: A more refined and rhyming variant of Decapolitical.
9. Caravanian (rainbow)
   Status: The trade tongue of the caravans in the Yellow Waste and of some of the nomad tribes there.
   Writing: for trade
   Notes: Borrows from many languages. Speakers can bend the language to adapt it for speakers of a certain language, as well as make it indecifrable to anyone else but caravanians, if they want.
10. Oranjetic (rainbow)
    Status: The vulgar dialects of of Orange Land, very similar to Saffranian
    Writing: not much
    Notes: A musical dialect, exquisite in song.
11. Redland District Cant (rainbow)
    Status: The badly rhyming vulgare speech of the autonomous enclave of the Redland District
    Writing: yes, but mostly political tracts
    Notes: Large influence of decapolitical. Lots of swearing.
12. Red Tongue (rainbow)
    Status: The vulgar dialects of the Red Land, with many dwarven elements admixed.
    Writing: not much
    Notes: Influenced heavily by the slurred speech of the long-reigning Grand Red Duke Moshle IV, the red tongue tends to say "sh" instead of "s" and run words together they way they do after too many cups of wine.
13. Winerian (dwarven)
    Status: The hill dwarf dialects of the vintner dwarves of the Red Land and Orange Land.
    Writing: not much
    Notes: heavily influenced by the Red Tongue, Winerian is the most linear of the Dwarven dialects.
14. Volkan (dwarven)
    Status: The mountain dwarf dialects of the Mountains of Light and the Black Gold.
    Writing: yes
    Notes: When written, the space between the characters has as much meaning as the characters themselves. Much is lost by speaking it. Lots of silences and isolated consonants. It's best spoken indoors, or in caves with a lot of echo. The echo is part of the language. It sounds very strange outdoors, parts of the words are missing.
15. Woodlander (elven)
    Status: The language found inscribed on trees and rocks in the Elvenwood, spoken by some of the tribes there.
    Writing: yes
    Notes: The language is structured to change meaning with the seasons and the phases of the moon, as though it does not quite belong on the solid earth.
16. Steppe Speeches (steppe, rainbow)
    Status: The various dialects of the Ultraviolet Grasslands grew from a patois of rainbow dialects and steppeland trade tongues.
    Writing: no?
    Notes: Immense vocabulary for grazing creatures and mechanical engineering.
17. Sunsettish (steppe)
    Status: The common trade language of the western steppelanders.
    Writing: for trade.
    Notes: a surprisingly large focus is given to spirits and spirit possession in this language.
18. White Line (steppe)
    Status: the cryptic language of the Porcelain Princes was once more widespread, now it has been reduced to their outposts and trading missions.
    Writing: yes
    Notes: Extensive polybody structure, some of the more refined forms of the speech require multiple telepathically synchronized voices used in unison to convey meaning properly.
19. Satrap Canto (steppe?)
    Status: the color and light adapted language of the Spectrum Satraps seems to an outlying dialect of some larger language group or system.
    Writing: yes, polychromatic
    Notes: Without light-generating organs, or a rainbow translation array, this language is practically unusable.

The Dead and Weird Languages

1. Black City Alphabet (?)
   Status: A language found inscribed on some metal sheets brought from the mythical Black City in the west
   Written: yes
   Notes: Some say it's not a language, just some intricate patterns. Faraway people joke that the writings are really the schemas for a very complicated dance.
2. Deep Dwarven (dwarven)
   Status: The hidden priestly language of the deep dwarves that is not spoken but only carved in stones and bones.
   Written: hell, yes!
   Notes: It can be written in any direction, even constructing beautiful figures with the characters. Very succinct. Some carvings are considered visual poetry. A subset of Deep Dwarven is Deep Dwarven Hexadecimal, used for programming the Dwarven prayer machines.
3. Blue Tongue (isolate)
   Status: The forgotten speech of the Blue God, now used by some secretive cults and mad wizards.
   Written: yes
   Notes: Harsh, logical, iconographic, ambiguous by nature.
4. Elven (elven)
   Status: A hypothetical elven language
   Written: unknown
   Notes: Reconstructed by sages from fragments of woodlander and moonlander.
5. Moonlander (elven?)
   Status: An extinct (?) language found inscribed in tombs in the Mountains of the Moon.
   Writing: yes
   Notes: Samples of the writing have been found to be memetic worms, taking over the reader’s mind and driving them to perform odd, incomprehensible tasks. Though usually not deadly, permanent personality changes and even madness have been noted often enough to make the reading of this language become commonly associated with lunacy.

You read this far? Great! So, here's a bonus thing - the picture is from the Red Tundra. An unfinished bit of hexcrawl I wrote a while back, a morass of floating ice, dismal shores, and scattered fragments of a Time Best Forgot. Oh, and site of the Black Obelisk.