✅ This article contains no plot spoilers. Pure worldbuilding — read on.
Three sapient races, three distinct tongues — and between them, a web of contact, contempt, practical necessity, and buried history that shapes every diplomatic encounter in the known world. The Midland Empire has made multilingualism a functional norm among its educated classes; the Highfolk regard their language as self-evidently superior and the effort of learning others as beneath them except when inconvenient; and the Deepfolk share their language with outsiders approximately as freely as they share everything else about themselves, which is to say barely at all.
Beneath all three runs a fourth fact that almost no one knows: two of these languages are related. Distantly, in the bones of grammar and the roots of certain words, Middlish and Koine tell the same story. No scholar has published on this. The implications are too large.
Middlish — formally Middle Speech — is the official language of the Midland Empire: the tongue of the court, of trade, of imperial administration, and of any communication between parties who share no other common ground. It is the world's closest equivalent to a universal language, which is less a tribute to its beauty than to the Empire's commercial reach.
It is a flowing language — rounded vowels, soft consonants, a melodic quality that Highfolk describe as simple and Deepfolk describe as excessive. It does not use the sounds represented by y, k, or th; where these appear in foreign words or names adopted into Middlish, they are replaced by i, c, and t respectively. This substitution is consistent enough to be a reliable marker: a name with a hard k or a th in it is not a Middlish name.
Middlish names have older forms that carry a certain formal weight, while newer coinage has drifted toward something more accessible across the Empire's many provincial populations. The result is a language that feels neither entirely ancient nor entirely modern, which suits an empire that presents itself as both.
The Empire is linguistically diverse in ways that visitors from more homogeneous nations find disorienting. At least half a dozen languages are spoken within Imperial borders as first languages — provincial tongues, allied domain languages, the speech of hill peoples and coastal communities that have been nominally Imperial for centuries without becoming culturally so. Middlish is the thread connecting them: nearly everyone learns it, few abandon their native tongue.
Among ordinary provincials, speaking two or three languages is unremarkable. A merchant from the northern provinces might conduct business in Middlish, argue with his family in the local dialect, and negotiate with Rulen traders in a third tongue entirely. In Maritana, where the Empire's diversity concentrates, it is possible to spend an entire afternoon at the harbour market without hearing the same language twice.
Educated nobles are expected to manage at least three or four languages with diplomatic competence. The purpose is practical: the Empire governs through relationships, and speaking to a vassal in their own language is a form of respect that Middlish cannot replicate.
Empress Maren has mastered eight languages. She deploys them deliberately — addressing vassals in their native tongue at formal occasions, switching languages mid-conversation when the political moment calls for it. It is one of the more effective tools in an extensive toolkit.
Koine — meaning simply common speech — is the shared language of all Highfolk cities. It developed from a family of older regional dialects, most of which have long since disappeared from living use, leaving Koine as the only surviving branch. All Highfolk cities speak it; all Highfolk children are raised in it; and the local variations between cities are minor enough that a Zelan and a Trossan can argue with each other in the same tongue, which they frequently do.
To human ears, Koine sounds archaic and somewhat severe. Where Middlish flows, Koine cuts — hard consonants, clipped rhythms, a sound that carries authority even in casual speech. The sounds y, k, and th appear constantly; they are among the most characteristic features of the language, the mirror image of Middlish's avoidances. Humans who study Koine describe the experience as learning to speak with a different part of the mouth.
It is not unlearnable. The two language families are further apart than most people realise — and closer than anyone officially acknowledges — but the distance is crossable with sustained effort. Lia managed it: several years of study in Maritana from Highfolk manuscripts, followed by total immersion in Aeloria, produced functional fluency. Her accent remains noticeable, a consistent marker that the words are right but the speaker is not Highfolk.
Highfolk are unanimous that Koine is the superior language and largely unanimous that Middlish is simple enough to acquire without much effort, which is not quite true. Educated Highfolk and those with regular surface trade contacts speak Middlish well; many ordinary Highfolk have no Middlish at all and see no reason why they should.
In Aeloria, where the human quarter brings regular contact with surface merchants and traders, Middlish fluency is more common than in other cities. Kyrian speaks it without accent — diplomatic training, deployed deliberately. Thalis speaks it fluently, driven by scholarly interest in human affairs. Beros has it practically, picked up through years on merchant ships; the way he speaks it reveals exactly that origin, idioms and all. House Emporios learned it for the same reason most Aeloria merchants did: because money crosses language barriers more smoothly when you can count in both.
Highfolk clergy and warriors generally do not bother. They see no reason to.
Koine is not a single register. It varies significantly by caste, city, and context.
Celestial speech is formal, extended, and metaphorical — a preference for complexity that functions as class marker as much as communication style. The archaic pronouns thou and thee are reserved for specific contexts: religious ceremony, official pronouncement, extreme emotion, ancient oaths. They are also used, pointedly, as a form of condescension — addressing a two-wing or a human in thou signals that the speaker considers them beneath the ordinary courtesy of formal address. The highest Celestial ranks use third-person self-reference in formal contexts.
Two-wing speech is direct, concrete, and shorter. The same language, different relationship to it.
Trossan speech sits between: educated and precise, but without the elaborate formality of Celestial register. Trossans use we more readily than I — collective identity expressed through grammar before it is expressed through any explicit statement.
Hurud — meaning simply Speech, or the Speech — is the language of the Deepfolk. The name itself is characteristic: where other races name their tongues after geography, history, or culture, the Deepfolk named theirs after the act of speaking. There is no other speech worth distinguishing it from, as far as they are concerned.
What is apparent to anyone who has heard it: the language is built on hard consonants and deep vowels. It rumbles. It cuts. There is a percussive quality to it that Highfolk find unpleasant and some humans find strangely compelling — a sound that seems to come from lower in the body than ordinary speech, like the language itself is aware of the stone beneath the ground. Scholars who have been allowed to hear extended conversation describe it as beautiful in a way that requires recalibration of what beauty means.
The known vocabulary of the Hurud available to surface scholars is minimal. Deepfolk guard it as they guard everything else about themselves.
Aghtan — humans. Literally "head-people": those who live on the ceiling of the Deepfolk world, on the surface above.
Khrosh — Highfolk. The only word the Hurud possesses for the winged race. It means, approximately, "unattractively skinny person." It is a dirty word. Deepfolk use no other term for Highfolk, which tells you something about the relationship.
Gharzhen — the Deepfolk self-name. Stone-Kin, or Earth-Born, depending on dialect and clan.
Whether there is significant vocabulary variation between the nine clans — whether Clan Abyss sounds different from Clan Torrent, whether the priests of Clan Fervor have a ritual register unknown to outsiders — is unknown. Deepfolk have not said.
The Rulen peoples of the northern Imperial provinces speak their own language, distinct from Middlish and from the various provincial tongues of the south. It is from the Rulen linguistic tradition that the Wind-Callers — the powerful shamanic practitioners whose practices occupy a legal grey area in Imperial law — draw their ritual speech. Whether the Wind-Caller ritual register is the Rulen common tongue, a specialised sacred variant, or something older that merely resembles it is a question surface scholars have not resolved.
There is a structural relationship between Middlish and Koine that no mainstream scholar in either culture has publicly described, because doing so would require explaining it — and explaining it requires positing a period of deep contact between Highfolk and humans that the dominant account of history does not acknowledge.
In the grammar of certain constructions, in the roots of words relating to sky, stone, and the act of building, the two languages rhyme in ways that cannot be coincidence. They are not the same language. They are not even close, on the surface. But below the surface, something is shared.
The Origin movement has noted this, in texts that are not widely circulated. Their interpretation is theological. Others, if they knew, might draw different conclusions. For now, the connection sits in the language itself, waiting.
Male: endings -os, -on, -as, -an, -or
Examples: Kyrian, Zephyros, Solarian, Theron, Kallios, Astraion
Female — Two-Wing: endings -is, -es
Examples: Thalis, Lyris, Daphnes, Koris, Brynis
Female — Celestial: double-vowel endings: -aeis, -eas, -aea, -eia, -oia
Examples: Aethraeis, Lyraea, Cassaeas, Kalleia, Sophaea
The Celestial female naming pattern is an audible caste marker — hearing the name tells you the speaker's status before anything else is known about them.
Hurud — meaning simply Speech — is the Deepfolk name for their own language. Names in Hurud follow its broader phonetic character: hard consonants, deep vowels, usually two to three syllables. Common endings: -ash, -an, -ar, -um, -us. Names often carry meanings rooted in stone, earth, depth, or strength.
Examples: Barash, Gharzhan, Marduk, Khamun, Azar
Female Deepfolk names are not documented. Deepfolk women do not appear in surface contexts, and no outsider has been in a position to ask. Whether they follow the same naming patterns as male names is unknown.
Full name format: [Personal name] of Clan [Clan name], [Caste if relevant]
Example: Barash of Clan Monolith, Master Builder
This article is about Culture & Language
| World Overview | World Index |
| Peoples | Highfolk · Deepfolk · Human / Empire |
| Related | The Three Races |