Overview
CM-LANG-0001During the First Trilogy Era, four great languages are present in Sol System. All four evolved through a centuries-long process of dedialectization — the natural compression of regional linguistic diversity into unified, interoperable tongues driven by trade, migration, and the collapse of geographic isolation as humanity spread through the solar system. Three of the four were subsequently formalized and codified by the New School in the early Standard Era, becoming the official languages of the Consortium's three IPS Spheres. The fourth — Solari — arose independently, belongs to no institution, and is older than any of the others in its codified form.
Learning at least one of the three Consortium languages beyond one's local dialect is compulsory for all Consortium citizens. The New School coined the names Anglatin, Cyrillic, and Asiatic as part of its broader program of linguistic standardization — a program inseparable from its political function as the intellectual apparatus of Consortium hegemony. The naming itself is a form of authority: to name a language is to define its boundaries, and to define its boundaries is to decide who is inside them.
The New School codified three languages and called it unity. Solari already existed and called itself nothing. Both positions contain a truth about what language is actually for.
HELENA-Prime · Archival CommentaryThe Four Great Languages
The primary language of the American Integrated Production Sphere and its official language of business. Anglatin is the unified synthesis of English, Romance languages, and revivalist Latin, with contributing elements from Dutch, German, Gaelic, Scandinavian, and Dravidian. It uses an extended Latin alphabet and is built around a core vocabulary of approximately 1,000 words designed to allow any speaker to be understood internationally while still accommodating local dialect variation.
The Latin revival that Anglatin embodies was not spontaneous. During the Second Renaissance, Latin was resurrected from purely academic use to common parlance — the first time in more than two thousand years it had functioned as a living language. The New School's linguist Silvinus Herminus Januarius was a critical figure in this revival. Anglatin is the primary artifact of that project: a language that consciously connects the Standard Era to Roman antiquity as part of the Consortium's Romano-centric historical self-image.
Selected Vocabulary
The alphabet extends the Latin base with additional characters: Æ, Ç, Ñ, ß, Ü — each drawn from one of the contributing language families, representing the merger that produced Anglatin rather than disguising it.
The official language of the Soviet IPS Sphere. A blend of Russian, Ukrainian, Greek, and various Eastern European languages, codified under the New School's standardization program. It retains the Cyrillic alphabet as its writing system — a deliberate continuity with Soviet cultural identity, positioning the USSR's linguistic tradition as the organizing principle of its unity language rather than adopting a neutral script.
The official language of the People's Republic IPS Sphere. A blend of simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Malay, and other Sino-Pacific elements — the most linguistically diverse of the three unity languages by number of contributing systems. Asiatic uses the Hangul alphabet as its writing system: a choice that privileges none of the contributing East Asian scripts over others, providing a more genuinely neutral orthographic basis than either of the other Consortium languages achieved.
Solari is the free and ever-evolving common trade language of Sol System. It is the mishmash — the honest word — of Anglatin, Cyrillic, and Asiatic that arose naturally from the contact between their speakers across the Belt, the Rim, and the spacer corridors connecting them. It predates the SY 1 codification of any of the three standard Consortium languages and was not designed by anyone. It is what happens when people need to talk to each other and no institution is in the room.
Basic Solari is a formalized shorthand of approximately a thousand common words, sufficient to allow spacers from any world of origin to communicate across IPS lines. It functions as the lingua franca of the outer system — the language of the Belt and Rim — and is the working language of commerce, negotiation, and daily life anywhere the Consortium's three unity tongues do not natively reach.
Solari's alphabet borrows characters from all contributing systems: Latin letters sit alongside Cyrillic equivalents and Hangul vowels, with Chinese numerals running in parallel. It is a writing system that looks like what it is — a collaborative improvisation. During the Third Trilogy Era, Solari contributes to and evolves into Galactic Standard. That future is not yet visible from the FTE.
Common Phrases & Terms
- frakk General expletive — spacer profanity, origin uncertain
- tanj "There ain't no justice" — ironic fatalism, common among Belters
- nerf Mild expletive / general negative exclamation
- [static click] Nonverbal "no" — simulates radio static; used when verbal response is impractical or emphatic silence is preferred
- Neil and Yuri Euphemism for "first" or "number one" — honoring the first American and Soviet space pioneers; deeply embedded in spacer oral tradition
Solari grammar characteristically converts adjectives into nouns for emphasis or slang: "They're a lunar," "Have you seen any new stirrings," "Your kid looks like a carbon scrubber." The construction reflects a culture that values economy of speech and expects listeners to fill in context.
The New School & Dedialectization
The New School — the academic philosophy originating at New Athens in SY 37 and functioning as the de facto intellectual apparatus of the Consortium — codified Anglatin, Cyrillic, and Asiatic from the centuries-long organic trend toward linguistic compression that predated it. Dedialectization was already happening; the New School formalized it, named the products, and made learning at least one Consortium language beyond one's local dialect compulsory for all Consortium citizens.
The standardization was not politically neutral. The New School used its linguistic authority as a propaganda instrument, deliberately suppressing what it termed "Old Earth" terminology in favor of Consortium-preferred replacements — most visibly the substitution of Terra for Earth, a shift that frames the planet as a classical Roman referent rather than the home of the people it is being renamed for. Language, for the New School, was always also history, and history was always the Consortium's to write.
The El'yon possess a language of their own derived from the single language of the First Empire — the Aion'ari'yon tongue that predates written history in Sol System by an epoch that makes the concept of "old" inadequate. El'yonic is primarily a psychic language: the El'yon communicate with one another through thought, feeling, and intuition, reserving vocalization almost exclusively for communication with mortal and less evolved races. When spoken aloud, El'yonic has creative power — it is not possible to lie in it, and when spoken aloud, the creation it names becomes physical.
El'yonic's spoken vocabulary substantially influenced ancient Sumerian, and through Sumerian, several of Earth's subsequent language lineages. The three Consortium unity languages and Solari carry, embedded in their etymological roots, traces of a language spoken before humanity knew what language was. The dedialectization the New School formalized was, in this deeper register, not the compression of human linguistic diversity but the convergence of human language toward something that was always already underneath it.