Languages on Evis

= Overview = The languages on Evis bear a striking resemblance to many Earth languages. The most commonly spoken language, by far, is MEWA Standard, while the least commonly spoken language is Osmine. This page will make comparisons and contrasts between Earth languages and Evis languages.

MEWA Standard
MEWA Standard (can be pronounced "me-wa" or "mew-uh", though the first pronunciation is more commonly used throughout much of the planet) is an invented language, similar to Esperanto, but remarkably, it ended up being identical to English in nearly every way, with the only major difference being that it has German's compound word system. That is, while simply attaching two words in English to convey an idea may not form a legitimate word, that word would almost certainly be valid in MEWA Standard- for example, in English you might say "software engineering" but in MEWA Standard, you would say "softwareengineering", or "homecomputer" instead of home/personal computer, simply running these words together. Of course, this is a simple example, but much like with German, the combination possibilities are seemingly endless. With any compound word, to pluralize it you would simply use the pluralization of the last word.

MEWA stands for the initials of the countries that proposed this language and helped to form it- Myalis, Esmon, Wonovell and Aibrivea. The four countries combined elements of their own languages to create a new language that would be fairly easy to understand by anyone who spoke the source languages. The other countries, upon hearing of this, liked the idea of a universally intelligible language and decided to adopt MEWA Standard as well, and now it's widely spoken throughout all of Evis, and because of this development language barriers are nearly non-existent, except for some people who live in very traditional rural areas where they didn't have access to MEWA Standard resources and couldn't learn the language as a result, or especially when reading old texts from countries like Sterenia or Menaiba written before MEWA Standard was around.

Obsolete languages
Due to MEWA Standard's wide-scale adoption, most of the other languages fell out of favor and will soon become, for all intents and purposes, dead languages. Many people in their respective countries choose to learn them anyway, whether to respect and honor their traditions, for purposes of reading old texts, or simply archiving and preservation to help ensure the language doesn't become lost to time.

Traditional Myalian
Traditional Myalian is very similar to Middle English, with heavy Old English and Shakespearean English elements present as well. Of these "obsolete languages", it's believed that Traditional Myalian has the most documents and inscriptions on statues/buildings/etc. written in it- or rather, more Traditional Myalian texts have been found than in any other language.

Wonovellian
Wonovellian actually had two different forms in its existence- an early form spoken by the indigenous people of Wonovell (at least, in the area that Captain Rolf Dee discovered) and expansions on this language after the area was colonized and further settled by Aibrivea.

Dee-Wonovellian
This initial version of Wonovellian was the form of the language spoken by the natives prior to being colonized by Aibrivea. It's referred to as "Dee-Wonovellian" because it was the version that Captain Dee was exposed to and heard. Supposedly, it used an alphabet similar to the Galactic Standard Alphabet (from Minecraft), had a sentence structure in which verbs always went at the beginning of a sentence, and had no group pronouns, like an equivalent of "we" or "they", instead denoting plurality by adding a suffix to singular pronouns like "I" or "he".

Aibrovellian/Latter Wonovellian
After the colonization by Aibrivea, the natives over time incorporated elements of Aibriven that their language didn't have into it. Notable changes they made, inspired by the Aibriven language, included using the same (Latin-like) alphabet, adding group pronouns, adding a few cases Aibriven had, and adding many other words that Dee-Wonovellian didn't have, a lot like how English borrows words from languages like German, French or Japanese.

Other Wonovellian variations
There were definitely other tribes of indigenous people in Wonovell besides the particular one that Dee and his crew met, as confirmed by numerous historical accounts, many of whom spoke a different language from that particular tribe, but unfortunately the native languages of these tribes were inadequately preserved and have been lost to history, with the texts found in these regions remaining undeciphered to this day.

Esmonese
Esmonese came about when the natives from Wonovell expanded into the territory currently known as Esmon. This initially happened during the time when Dee-Wonovellian was still spoken, but as Aibrivea didn't colonize this part of the continent, it never got any Aibriven influence and evolved separately. This resulted in many similarities to Dee-Wonovellian being maintained, and thus slightly intelligible to Latter Wonovellian speakers, for a time, but it eventually evolved to where the languages were no longer mutually intelligible.

Osmine
Osmine uses an alphabet that looks similar to some Japanese hiragana and kanji, but unlike kanji these represent just individual sounds rather than whole words and cannot substitute for another letter. It also has a Japanese-like sentence structure. The pronunciations and most words, however, are identical to Hawaiian.

Sterene
Sterene is nearly identical to Russian in every way, though the Sterene alphabet uses some characters not found in Russian and has no hard or soft signs.

Aibriven
Aibriven is identical to Spanish in pronunciations, most words, and sentence structure, but the alphabet looks more like Polish, with heavy use of diacritical marks on Latin letters.

Menai
Menai bears a very strong resemblance to the Hindi language. Although it used a Latin alphabet, it still has the same pronunciations, grammar structures and even words.

Lunemese Menai
Lunemese is actually not a separate language from Menai, it is more like a dialect or altered version of the Menai language, sort of like how the version of German spoken in Austria or Switzerland is different from the version spoken in Germany, but is still ultimately the same language. Some of the pronunciations are slightly different and a few words are changed, but besides that, Lunemese Menai is nearly identical to regular Menai.