The languages of the Triassic colony

The languages of the Liber campaign follow an Indo-European-like pattern.

On arrival on this alien tropical continent, everyone had to understand the Spider Queen's language. Her humanoids, not possessing the vocal organs to speak this language, pidginised that best they could. The pidgin was never written, so drifted over the years, but always stayed in accordance with the Arach baseline, which was written.

Over millennia, sporadically, groups of human slaves found their way out. These ran away - as far away as they could get. Some of these tribes survive in the Great Swamp. This is like how the Anatolian and Tocharian branches left the first iterations of Indo-European. Some scattered, insular tribes - especially in the Swamp - maintain their "maroon" descendent of the Arach pidgin active at the time they left. Other tribes found the Tisyah friendly so have adopted the Tisyah dialect closest to them; these are not in this chart's scope.

The Nange language today dates from the Nange rebellion, Year Zero. That language hasn't changed much, given that they live longer than we do, and also acquired a literaty standard. The language of the Kham's earliest books is very similar to Nange. Human escapees from the Kham have spread successor-languages, diverging from Nange and from each other not unlike mediaeval Italian and French from Church Latin.

As a rule, if the tribe's ancestors left the Spider's web before the Nange revolt, it is illiterate and at a Chalcolithic/Ceramic stage at best. As with Americans in our New World, every effort for the last millennia has been toward survival on an alien planet.

Some regions have got to the pictograph stage, like Xia China or Predynastic Egypt, or the pre-hieroglyph Maya. Others have managed a syllabary, aping the Arach characters if not their meaning or sound, like Bishop de Landa (badly) transcribed old Maya and like the Cherokee started over with their script.

For over two centuries Kham has imposed its rule, with a simplified trade-version of the Nange language, upon the tribes in its territory. Here, the para-Kham "dialects" are basically gone and the older tribal languages are dying out. Such languages are doing a little better across the watershed on account their neighbours aren't human.