Do the Tevarin speak their own language, or do they now speak common human languages?
TL;DRTevarin language use varies: clans outside the UEE and revivalists keep it, many in the UEE speak only UEE Standard, and the writers speculate it may be partly blended into common speech, with no firm decision.
It depends on where you are in the universe. There are some Tevarin clans outside of the UEE that would certainly still preserve the language, but most of the Tevarin that were absorbed into the UEE, when they got rid of their culture, they most likely threw away their language too. They're just like, this is shit. This didn't serve us well. None of this protected us when it counted. So why should we still bother to use it?
I mean, again, yeah, I don't know. I think it might be one of those things that once we get the language online, we figure it out. Because at the same time, definitely they were like, screw Rijora, it was useless. But it still feels to me like there'd still be patches where the language has survived, because that was just their way of communication. It's out there. Definitely in Branaugh. Definitely, like you said, the ones who were trying to resurrect the old Tevarin ways would probably adhere more to it.
I think there's definitely been renewed interest in recent times. Sorry, Adam, go for it.
It's been like 300-plus years since the end of the Second Tevarin War and the species officially being integrated into the UEE. In that amount of time, you can see the language has probably dropped off a lot, but it's still not so old that it's like Latin, where it's completely lost. There are still probably people that have been speaking it and keeping it alive. I believe there is a bit of a resurgence right now, at least in the game world.
One thing that would be really fun, once we start tackling the language itself, would be to have, similar to what you said with Latin, it patchwork-integrated into human common, so that you might get words that carry over. They might still speak a dialect of it that's a bit more integrated with the language of the UEE: more of an assimilated, UEE Standard old Tevarin. And then you have the purists who are back to Rijora, speaking pure Tevarin, which is like the broken one, but a little bit more refined. But just to give it that sense of, even their language is sort of assimilating into English or UEE Standard.
Yeah, with the big rejection in that whole period of time, I think there's a large population of the Tevarin who only speak UEE Standard. That's it. That's their language. And now you start getting people, maybe, who grew up only speaking Standard who are like, I would like to connect more with my past. I'm going to take a class to try to learn how to speak Tevarin again. And to Adam's point, it's really interesting, because this isn't like a lost language, like how we don't understand ancient Greek, because we encountered them in a digital age, so there's good documentation on this language.
Even though they did purge their culture after the Second Tevarin War and tried to clear a lot of that out, there'd still be a digital record. The Kabal system was recently discovered with a bunch of ancient Tevarin artifacts there. That's always a well we can go to and say the language or things that might have been lost have been re-found here.
From a linguistics perspective, 600 years is a very long time. We don't speak the same language. We speak English right now, us here, but English 600 years ago did not sound like this. The Tevarin that exists now, even if there was an unbroken chain from the Tevarin on Kaleeth to the Tevarin on Branaugh, they're not going to speak the exact same language, just because of how language changes.
I've seen the conversation on Spectrum about people being like, well, in 2950, humans would not be sounding anything like... We have chosen not to do, like some authors do, that really cool thing where they create almost an entirely new language to show how different it's become over the hundreds of years. That might be more accurate, but we definitely have gone for more of a stylized version of the future.
It's the stylistic choice, like the no-AI thing. It was sort of a choice to make it not that very unusual-sounding English language, to keep it conversational so it still sounds grounded and real to us as players, rather than trying to accurately depict or predict what English or various languages will evolve to in 900 years, which I do not have the brain capacity for.
Yeah, like when you're watching a movie and everyone's Russian and you're like, why are they speaking with British accents? It's one of those suspensions of disbelief in order to be able to tell the story.