Languages in California
The English languages of the Pacific coast form a north-south dialect continuum. People living in adjacent regions can understand each other, but intelligibility decreases with distance. As in all English-descended languages, the main variant is vowel sounds, but in this case contact with Spanish is a huge factor as well: generally, the further south you go, the more the local language has absorbed Spanish vowels, consonants, grammatical patterns, and vocabulary.
These dialect boundaries are therefore, in many ways, generalizations. On the other hand, it is possible to group languages together based on written and scholarly standards, and on features that some groups have that their neighbors do not exhibit.
The southernmost Californian language is called Angelan, spoken mostly in the Free Zone and neighboring regions. Angelan has a very strong Spanish influence, even in some of its common grammatical words: no has totally replaced not, for example. Angelan is highly influential as a literary language, since most of the Sagas are originally in that language.
In the Republic, we can broadly divide people's speech into a northern and a southern language. Both are called Calian, but they are quite different and not mutually intelligible. The dividing line runs to the south of Sacramento. Northern Calian is the imperial standard, being the language of the capital and the chief port. Southern Calian (sometimes called Central Calian to acknowledge the Free Zone as being part of California) is also a written language. Many legal documents exist in that language, and most of the Sagas not in Angelan are in Southern Calian.
Eureka is bilingual. The language of the people is actually a dialect of Cascadian, the language of the Buddhist Northwest. But the elite learn Standard Calian and often pepper their speech with its refined phraseology.
The English languages of the Pacific coast form a north-south dialect continuum. People living in adjacent regions can understand each other, but intelligibility decreases with distance. As in all English-descended languages, the main variant is vowel sounds, but in this case contact with Spanish is a huge factor as well: generally, the further south you go, the more the local language has absorbed Spanish vowels, consonants, grammatical patterns, and vocabulary.
These dialect boundaries are therefore, in many ways, generalizations. On the other hand, it is possible to group languages together based on written and scholarly standards, and on features that some groups have that their neighbors do not exhibit.
The southernmost Californian language is called Angelan, spoken mostly in the Free Zone and neighboring regions. Angelan has a very strong Spanish influence, even in some of its common grammatical words: no has totally replaced not, for example. Angelan is highly influential as a literary language, since most of the Sagas are originally in that language.
In the Republic, we can broadly divide people's speech into a northern and a southern language. Both are called Calian, but they are quite different and not mutually intelligible. The dividing line runs to the south of Sacramento. Northern Calian is the imperial standard, being the language of the capital and the chief port. Southern Calian (sometimes called Central Calian to acknowledge the Free Zone as being part of California) is also a written language. Many legal documents exist in that language, and most of the Sagas not in Angelan are in Southern Calian.
Eureka is bilingual. The language of the people is actually a dialect of Cascadian, the language of the Buddhist Northwest. But the elite learn Standard Calian and often pepper their speech with its refined phraseology.
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