Ancient Asurian was the principle language of the Asurian Empire. Vulgar langugaes have drifted signiciantly over the millennia since the fall of the empire, but many of the traditions and religious practices of the day have been preserved. This includes a number of ritual prayers, which are traditionally spoken in Asurian. Linguistic drift has led to a shift in pronunciation, resulting in a dialect scholars refer to as Spiritual Asurian. From what is known about the Ancient dialect, it's likely that someone speaking Ancient Asurian would have great difficulty understanding someone speaking Spiritual Asurian, and vice versa.
Ritual Use
While there are many ways to honour the gods, Asurian rituals are still popular throughout
Asuria, and to a lesser extent in former provinces of the Asurian Empire. Many of these include rote prayers that priests and priestesses leading the ritual have memorized. Some sects believe it proper to speak the full prayer in Asurian, while others have chosen certain invocations which they speak in Asurian. Still others use fully translated prayers, with the orignal only maintained in text form.
Secular Use
Spiritual Asurian is commonly tutored among the noble class, where it is also used as the language of diplomacy. In more recent times, it has also been growing in popularity as a common language of science, allowing those in academia to communicate with their peers in far off kingdoms. Many of the working class view this as an exercise of classism, favouring the much more widely known
Trader's Tongue.
Language Preservation
The long term use of Spiritual Asurian in prayer means that religious scholars can still read the Ancient Asurian texts, and several orders, such as the
Order of the Divine Wills in the
Abbey of Caelester, have devoted considerable efforts over the millennia to preserving large caches of Ancient Asurian texts. Ever since the development of the
Printing Press a century ago, they have begun translating these texts into modern languages and publishing copies for public use, which has kindled a new age of advancement resulting from the combination of long forgotten ideas with modern technologies.
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