The Way of the Voice

This article originally appeared in issue #4 of the Silly Linguistics magazine

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By Diana Vereris

You’ve seen the title and you think there is something familiar in it, like you’ve heard it before, right? Or maybe you instantly recognized what this is all about? That’s right, the amazing language of ancient snowy peaks and ruins which once stood proudly as the chapels to the giant beasts of might, the voice of the dragons.

The dragon tongue or Dovah-zul which translates to the voice of the dragon, hereby starts the series of articles concerning the languages of fiction and show how authors have paid a lot of attention to details of their art and have created an entire language to make their world feel fuller.

If you are not yet familiar with Dovahzul, it was created by a senior designer and writer Emil Pagliarulo for the 2011 Bethesda Softworks’ game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. He stated that one of his inspirations was Beowulf composed in Old English, though the language itself doesn’t coincide directly with the alphabet we use in English, as there are 34 unique letters within it.

They don’t write /k/ and /s/ with one letter like English “c” but instead write them separately. Some original letters represent the sound we in English write as “oo”, “ur” and “aa”. Other sounds don’t have an easy equivalent like “uu”. The language sounds a bit Nordic, as the overall feel of all of Skyrim, and therefore also the ancient language we meet in it, is very Scandinavian-like.

The vocabulary, especially the word formation, resembles Germanic languages. Joining two words can create new ones (which you can see in German), for example “junnesejer” meaning “the kings of the west”, while “jun” on itself means “king” and “jer” “the east”. What’s interesting is that there are no words for “moon” but “kreinvulon” means the latter (literally, the dark where there is sun)

It is made of “krein” meaning the sun and “vulon” the night. The first word in the formation is considered more important, therefore “vulonkrein” would mean “night sun” or “the light in the night” or just simply “the moon”. To form the plural form, the first letter of the word and the letter “e” are added to the end of the word in most cases. The grammar of Dovahzul is almost identical to those of English language, though there are no apostrophes, tenses, punctuation, upper and lowercase letters and the prepositions come sooner than they do in English.

As for the writing system itself, it draws inspiration from the ancient Cuneiform script and the runes were designed to resemble claw marks etched into stone, typically with two or three slashes and a dot or hook formed by the dewclaw, so that it would be possible for the dragons themselves to write in Dovahzul. The author of such idea is the concept artist Adam Adamowicz.

Aside from dragon tablets with detail the dragon shouts used in the game, there are some texts, which we can read in the voice of the dragon. They are the in-game books “Dragon Tongue: Myth no More” (this one details the discovery and translation of the Dragon Language) and “Songs of Skyrim” along with its revised version “Songs of Skyrim: Revised”.

Some of the songs can be also heard, such as the Dragonborn Theme, which is the official theme of the game, through in the in-game book it is depicted as an ancient song without a tune and people aren’t sure about its pronounciation.

The fans of the series of course contribute to the language, coming up with new words (following the rules deduced from the in-game texts), translators, courses, numbers (for counting in Dovahzul see www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-t-count-in-dovahzul/en/dovahzul) and more. You can read more about it on thuum.org (where there is also the legacy translator from English to Dovahzul and vice versa and the biggest language-learning course on the internet), The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Wikia and The Unoficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP).

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