v50 Steam/Premium information for editors
  • v50 information can now be added to pages in the main namespace. v0.47 information can still be found in the DF2014 namespace. See here for more details on the new versioning policy.
  • Use this page to report any issues related to the migration.
This notice may be cached—the current version can be found here.

Human language

From Dwarf Fortress Wiki
Revision as of 22:35, 14 July 2024 by Silverwing235 (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This article is about the current version of DF.
Note that some content may still need to be updated.

Not to be confused with any real-life language.

The human language is one of the five languages the player will come across. This language is used in-game for the names of the universe, continents, rivers, human governments and settlements, humans, artifacts and engravings, However, as of yet, it lacks everything necessary for proper conversation, like grammar or personal pronouns.

Alphabet

The letters of the human alphabet are:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
Majuscule forms (also called uppercase or capital letters)
A Á B C D E F G H I J K L M N Ñ O P Q R S T U V W X Z
Minuscule forms (also called lowercase or small letters)
a á b c d e f g h i j k l m n ñ o p q r s t u v w x z

Of these 27 letters, 6 are vowels (A, Á, E, I, O, U); the 21 others are consonants.

The letter Y of the ISO basic Latin alphabet does not occur in the human alphabet.

Letter frequency

N Letter Frequency
1 A 1022 10.51%
2 Á 48 0.49%
3 B 251 2.58%
4 C 255 2.62%
5 D 341 3.51%
6 E 753 7.74%
7 F 38 0.39%
8 G 229 2.35%
9 H 89 0.92%
10 I 770 7.92%
11 J 56 0.58%
12 K 316 3.25%
13 L 515 5.3%
14 M 448 4.61%
15 N 350 3.6%
16 Ñ 56 0.58%
17 NG 65 0.67%
18 O 799 8.22%
19 P 261 2.68%
20 QU 59 0.61%
21 R 586 6.03%
22 S 656 6.75%
23 SH 124 1.28%
24 T 442 4.54%
25 TH 289 2.97%
26 U 690 7.1%
27 V 47 0.48%
28 W 57 0.59%
29 X 32 0.33%
30 Z 81 0.83%

Graphemics

The study of the graphemes, or writing units, of a script, and of their relation to the phonemes of the spoken language.

  • Digraphs th, sh, ng, and qu.
    • q only occurs in the digraph qu.
  • Common consonant clusters st, sl, sm, sp, str, and thr.
  • Human has no diphthongs.
  • x, ñ, and j are always followed by a vowel.
  • Possible syllable structure (C)3VC(C).

Diacritic meaning

The human language only has one diacritic (◌́) used on one vowel (a). It is probable that this is used to represent syllable stress. With the words revealed to us so far, this probably means only the syllables with an a can be stressed.

Vocabulary

Main article: Language#Vocabulary

The average word in the Human language is 4.723 letters long, while the longest known words are thrathdad ("fortress") and stithngat ("profane").

The average word has 1.792 syllables. Words either have one or two syllables.

Races
Divine · Dwarven · Elvish · Goblin · Human · Kobold
Modding
Text Sets