Languages

There are a number of languages in use throughout Lasair, though most are limited to small regions and only spoken by a single race. The language spoken by the widest variety of people is by far High Common, the commerce language of the human lands.

Human Languages

High Common

High Common is the language used by citizens of the City-States in their everyday dealings with each other. The language was created for use as a trade language shortly after the signing of the Compact, once a sufficient number of scholars were available to hold a conclave. High Common is a very utilitarian language, designed to be highly functional and detailed, permitting speakers to get quickly to a point and to discuss a subject with great precision. It is by no means a beautiful language, though artists of a stubborn bent will occasionally try to create poetry or music in the language when attempting to create a "work for the masses".
The language was largely pieced together by amalgamating the regional languages spoken in the City-States around the time of the Compact, and its useful nature allowed it to quickly supplant practically all use of those languages. A sub-council of scholars, overseen by specialist Mages, translated the Compact into the new tongue and used it as a tool to teach citizens the language. The brevity of the language is demonstrated in the Shrine of the Compact, where the words are carved in stone next to the same words in Lumina and Arcana: the High Common version of the Compact is only two-thirds as long as the other two.
Practically every resident of the City-States speaks High Common, as it was designed to be easy to learn and functionally consistent.
Because the language was pieced together from existing regional languages (many of which were derived from common sources) a rare speaker of one of the old human languages could adequately function in High Common, though much of the vocabulary might be confusing and others would find their mode of speech obviously wrong (or at least "foreign") in some manner.

Low Common

Simplified versions of the High Common language used primarily amongst agricultural communities far removed from the cities, Low Common is a catchall term for languages not specifically created but devolved from High Common through centuries of neglect. In places where there is not much need for the full vocabulary of High Common, much of the language can go unused. This has led to many regions where the language spoken cannot truly be considered the same as the full tongue; experts refer to these dialects as Low Common.
Because a Low Common language results from disuse of the full "high" language, it will often be very specialized to its region. For instance, many Fertile Lands farming communities have a dialect that has a scarcity of words for metals. The farmers limit themselves simply to adjectives such as "hard" or "soft" metal, determining if a given metallic item will be suitable for their work or not. Likewise, a remote mining community in the south would retain the full range of metal words, since they would obviously need to be able to specify between finding a vein of copper, iron, or mithryl, but would have a limited vocabulary for discussing weather or plants.
A subset of Low Common does include one specifically created language: Trade Common. Trade Common was created by a group of merchants with the intent of providing themselves with a language to use when dealing with non-humans or any others that might not have encountered High Common before. This dialect retains whatever was deemed useful for facilitating trade between remote peoples, and is designed to be extremely easily taught. It excises all redundancy and often simplifies the fine precision of description that High Common is capable of.

Lumina

Priests of The Virtues and those that are devout readers of sacred texts will be familiar with Lumina, as it is the language used within those texts. It is a flowing and flowery language given to painting great mental images without being concerned with such details as brevity or being succinct. The original Scrolls of Virtue were written in this language, and copies of the scrolls form the basis of learning Lumina for both clergy and academia.
Priests will often converse in the language, as will many scholars, due to its presence in the Scrolls as well as in many other ancient texts. Artists also prefer to create works in Lumina because its smoothly curving sound tends to sound beautiful to the ear even if the listener cannot understand the words, and its written form consists of rounded, curling shapes with no hard, pointed edges. Lumina is used as the language of choice for official civic functions in several cities, both due to its association with the religion of the Virtues, but also because when delivered by a fluent speaker the language can provide a great sense of ceremony and stateliness.
Lumina predates the Dragonscourge by an unknown amount of time; because the Virtues do not largely concern the recording of history it is not known precisely where the language was derived from. At least, that's the opinion of most humans. In fact, the language of Lumina is the primary language spoken by the Elves of the continent. While the elves were not responsible for the creation of the Virtues, their society was the model that ancient scholars followed when it came to learning and to teaching, and their language was naturally used by those of such ideals. This led to the language being preserved within human society through its use in religious text.

Arcana

The code language of the Mages, Arcana is aptly named. The language is extremely difficult to decipher, containing an alphabet of no less than 276 characters, obscure and often contradictory rules for grammar and syntax, and at least thirty-seven different ways to conjugate verbs. Learning the language requires at least four years of dedicated immersion study, and during this time the student cannot focus on any other academic tasks due to the mental calisthenics that the language puts a learner's brain through.
The Mages wouldn't have it any other way.
Arcana was created specifically to allow the Mages to hide dangerous magic from those not ready to use it, to quickly write down observations about magical experimentation, or to carry on a fully coherent conversation in the middle of a crowded town square without any possibility of a bystander having any clue about what is being discussed. The security that Arcana grants to the Mages is uncompromising and is a large reason why the Mages are generally very open about their presence: they don't need to hide themselves away to keep their activities secret.
The language also serves as a very useful tool for preparing apprentices for the daunting amount of work that they will have to undertake even to achieve the first rank of practicing Mage. A student's first task when taking an apprenticeship is always learning Arcana. Most teachers will refuse to provide assistance to the young aspirant, requiring them to pore through the introductory texts on their own. When a student feels ready, they my demonstrate their fluency to their teacher by being subjected to a full twelve hour conversation, which often will take place in a variety of highly distracting environments.
By making the learning of Arcana the first subject any apprentice must undergo, a Mage will learn the true measure of his student. A student that diligently plods through the work, or who brilliantly finds an insight within the obscurity will be a student that will be capable of performing the even more rigorous work of actually learning magic. A student that is easily flustered or who simply gives up clearly would make a poor Mage (at least in the opinions of the Mages themselves). This aspect of an apprentice's first task allows teaching Mages to weed out poor students as well as properly preparing promising pupils for the arduous work that will make up their first true years of magical study.

Other Languages

Dwarfish

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Hur'uk (Orcish)

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Chitter (Ratling)

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Draconic

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Undertongue

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