Languages of Humanity

Bonjour, privyet, halito, namaste, selamat siang, xin chào, mihofnima, muraho, zdrasti -- many of the ways that humanity once said "hello", once upon a time, when we were still young.

— textbook on language

Humanity on Istralar has had a long and complicated past. When they awoke, confused and naked at the desert-edge of an unblemished Sunari Wilderness, they were one people; over the next few milennia, this changed. They spread across Xin-Jiyu and to Valathe, traversing the land down to Takawaoku. finding their pathways to Kudara, and the very bravest settling in the icy wilderness of Iskaldhal.
With them, they brought language. And over the years, their words drifted.
Well over ten milennia into the future, the language of the original humans is nothing like what it once was. Fragmented into thousands and influenced by the many languages of Istralar's other inhabitants, what was once simple had become more complex than anyone could ever imagine. Nations as far apart as Yksinka and Vuorenmaa shared fragments and words in their own languages, despite having little to nothing to do with one another in the current day - and being on completely separate continents. Nations directly next to each other, such as Yulan Sheng and Sunadar - both fragments of the Empire of Meihua - have pasts filled with entirely different languages, with little mutual intelligibility.

Human Ethnicities

The Vaeltajat

Most nations are human-dominant, and as such, listing them here would overwhelm the page. Instead, see the Nations categories.

Successor Languages

• Common
• Inlára

The era-defining events, each time they occured, made things worse. The Divine War, the Arcane Compromise and the Worldrend each split the world, with the creation of Terra Arcana especially isolating a large chunk of the world's population for over a century. Language, upon the reunification, underwent a struggle.
Thankfully for the sakes of every other species - who had their own reasons for keeping a single language across the entirety of their species - empires rose. The Aletheian Empire, the Medimian Empire, the Empire of Meihua - amongst others now fallen. These needed a way to communicate across millions of people without the barrier of language, and for a time, the human languages were abandoned entirely by the noble classes. The Kingdom of the Galasthin Elves had once dominated the world, and the legacy of Elven was well-known.
And then, slowly, a common language arose. A single human language spoken across a number of Valathean states, with similarities to a number of other local languages. Across Medimia, Aletheia, Gothadrun, Ordan, Vostane - and the many other Western states - this language had spread like wildfire, used by the tradespeople of the time. Nobility picked up on it, and abandoned Elven at their earliest opportunity. The common language quickly became known as Common, and as the milennia wore on, it spread to more and more places.
Nowadays, in the year 5626, almost all human-dominated settlements use Common as their primary language. Some retain their former languages as secondary languages - with various legal statuses involved - whilst some have entirely wiped out their former language. Most retain vestiges, at least, of the former languages of their people - using them in names, placenames, and ceremonial purposes, for the most part.