Dragonic | World Behind the Veil

Dragonic

A language used by many dragon loyalists. It is a mix of ancient languages and was first formed several thousand years ago. Since then the language has developed and been adapted to whatever was needed. Over time, Sumerian, Egyptian, Chinese, Arabic, Swahili, English and many more languages have influenced the language and its script.   The language has never spread much beyond the loyalists and their families. The loyalists used it to communicate amongst themselves without others being able to understand them. The language had also a script which was first introduced in China and then shared across the world. The speakers added about four or five more ways to write the language, but only the Latin and Arabic script survived to modern times.   Today, the language is known even outside loyalist circles. There are online resources which allow anyone to learn it. However, since there aren't many speakers, it is more of novelty language. Anyone learning it does so mostly for bragging rights. There are still some that believe that the dragons actually spoke this language, but only Cassidy ever learned the language and she did not create it either.

Speakers & Dialects

Dragonic is spoken by around five thousand people around the world. There are basically no native speakers, with only a few exceptions. The core group of speakers are the dragon loyalists. It is generally expected of them to learn the language, however not everyone does as it is not a requirement. These make up about 20% of all speakers.   The biggest group of speakers are the members of descendant families of loyalists. These families often maintain the tradition of learning dragonic and ensure that each generation remembers the dragons' influence on their ancestor. As a result, the speakers of dragonic are concentrated to a few places in the world.   Almost rest of the speakers are members of the various dragon loyalist organizations like the Dragonic Order, Dragon Warrior Company or APU Security.   Since the fall of the veil, a small Discord community of dragon and language enthusiasts has managed to collect the resources to learn the language by themselves. In the community, there are around two hundred proficient speakers and some more at a lower level.

Scripts

Over the millennia, Dragonic has been written in many scripts. Only Chinese, Arabic and the Latin variants have survived. The Chinese script is by far the oldest and has only seen minor change. It is the most used script and has the largest body of written works by far. Second in use is the Latin alphabet, as it dominates the Western world, including New York City, where the highest concentration of loyalists live. Arabic has been on a decline for some centuries. A core group of loyalists still uses it in the Middle East.   Other scripts were in use in the past. Most of these scripts have been lost in ancient times and are not used by anyone outside of academia. Some might even be lost entirely.

Literature

A considerable corpus of literature is written in dragonic. All texts written in the language are collected by the Peking University Library, or at least a copy of them. More than half of them are written with the Chinese script and about thirty percent are written in the Latin script.   The most prolific author is Jiǎ Changming. He has written a collection of several hundred books and poems. They are very famous in China and many of them have been translated into more than 20 languages worldwide.

Linguistics Research

The unique nature, its global reach and the enormous wealth of influences have generated a lot of interest among linguists. Prior to the fall of the veil, only a handful of people had studied the language seriously. No real research was ever even published within the supernatural community. This changed once the linguist Mark Karwalden published the first paper on the language only three weeks after the fall of the veil. This paper opened the gates for a flood of papers, books and studies on the language and the people who speak it.
Spoken by
Dragon Loyalists, Descentants, Linguists, Language Nerds
Script
Chinese, Arabic, Latin
Notable Speakers
Cassidy, Vinaya


Cover image: Book of Magic by TJ Trewin

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