Dialect of Magical Creatures
There is no one form of this dialect, although all variations share enough features to be comprehensible to each other on at least some level, and it is spoken by all magical creatures (provided they did not grow up surrounded solely in human company). What form an individual or group of magical creatures speaks depends on a number of factors:
- Species: this affects what's referred to as the flavour of their dialect.
- Region: this affects accent, word choice, and some grammatical structure. Their vernacular, one might say. The region could be as general as a continent or as specific as the family an individual grew up with.
- Contact with humans: this affects both their overall fluency as well as how deep or light their use of the dialect can go
Dialectal Depth
Starting with the last first, the depth of an individual's dialect refers to how close it is to human speech. The lighter it is, the more humanlike it becomes (and therefore easier for humans to understand). The deeper, the more of its unique characteristics appear. The levels of dialectal depth, in order from lightest to deepest are:- Essentially human speech, with signature use of "you" and "thou" preserved, with or without a few other indicative pieces of vocabulary. Only those with the greatest fluency in human speech use this.
- Light dialect, where the most common vocabulary and grammar across the dialectal varieties are used, but it is still understandable to humans (if sometimes with difficulty). This is what most magical creatures who interact somewhat regularly with humans use when speaking with them.
- The Common Layer, which is the layer of depth most like the selkie dialect and the dialects of other ocean-dwelling magical creatures. This is understood across magical creatures and used when speaking when the species and/or regional differences in deeper dialectal use would make communication more difficult.
- Transitional speech would be when the speakers are of the same species but a different region, or the same region, but a different species, and therefore more of these shared dialectal features can be used, while still avoiding the differences that would make communication too difficult.
- Deep Dialect. This is the form of the dialect shared by species of the same region.
Spoken by
Remove these ads. Join the Worldbuilders Guild