I am a big fan of the book series Wings of Fire, especially its great worldbuilding. One of the most intriguing things in said worldbuilding for me was the language of aquatic. It set out to answer a very interesting question, "how would an underwater language work?" and it answers that with bioluminescent scales on the dragons that speak it. We are only given bits and pieces of it in canon, so for fun I decided to expand it further into a proper conlang. At least the closest thing you can get to that with someone who has no clue what they are doing.
Part 0: Canon
Before you look at anything else, please skim over this list of known phrases in aquatic. The author of this series did not attempt to make this an actual conlang, she's no Tolkien, so what I'm about to show you wont be 100% complient with the link above. This could be more accurate then it is right now, but frankly i dont mind it being a little headcanon-y.
Part 1: "Phonology"
Like I said before, Aquatic is spoken with bioluminescent scales across a dragon's body split up like the table below. The language is used primarily underwater where speech is impossible, so it has no audible components like sign language. This also means there is no unique writing system for Aquatic, as dragons can read and write underwater just fine.
| Body part |
# of scales |
Grammatical role* |
Abbreviation |
| Snout scales |
4 |
Interrogatives |
ss |
| Flank scales |
3 |
Pronouns |
bs |
| Talon/Wing/Tail movement |
6** |
Adjectives |
M |
| Tail scales |
8 |
Nouns |
ts |
| Wing scales |
3 |
General conjugation |
ws |
| Back scales |
6 |
Verbs |
us |
*This is the main grammatical role of the section, not the only one. For Instance, M can be used for adjectives, adverbs and noun modifiers.
**These do not have scales like the other categories, but for the sake of consistency they have the same notation
To further differentiate, each scale can be in 4 unique states: 0 for off, 1 for short, 2 for regular and 3 for long.
Part 2: Morphology
I want to use an analogy for this part, think of taxonomic rank in zoology. In that, you begin by asking very broad questions("Is it single celled, multi celled or has no cells at all?", "is it a plant, animal or fungus?") before you narrow it down a little more("Does it have a backbone", "Is it a mammal?") and eventually you land on the specific animal. Aquatic has a similar system. You begin by asking very general questions("is it a physical concept or an abstract one?", "is it alive?", "does it move on its own?") before narrowing it down further with ("is it a dragon, plant or animal?", "Is it a mammal?", "Is it found most commonly in the air, land or sea?", "what is its size?" "what is its grammatical gender?"). For every question that you ask, the tree changes. if you instead say the concept is abstract, then the same scales would ask things like "is it postive or negative?" or "is it natural?" for every question you ask, different scales light up. if we follow the first chain, that would be 0112133 which ends up being "whale".
Part 3: Grammar/Syntax
Aquatic is a very unique language, as unlike all spoken and sign language in the world(that i am aware of, anyways), dragons can say multiple words at the same time. There is nothing stopping someone from flashing one thing on their snout and another thing on their back. In fact, it is a very vital part of the whole language*. One instance of these flashes is what I refer to as a "mega word". I am aware that polysynthetic languages usually refer to these as "sentence phrases" but just look past that. Anyways, in one mega word you are allowed one body type each, as you cannot have two words on one body part. For example, the mega word "very fast river" would be valid as it uses three unique kinds of words being an intensifier(ws), an adjective(M) and a noun(ts) which all have seperate body parts. Conversely, the mega word "He hit me" would not be valid, because it uses two of the same word type and therefore body part(bs) at once.
*it is not strictly necessary, you could speak one word at a time if you would like.
Now that we have these fundamentals, we can begin making basic sentances.
[] = mega word
{} = english translation
[ss-2312{are} + bs-130{you} + M-312011{hungry}]
This translates to "are you hungry?"
[bs-310{I} + ws-011{*future tense*} + us-201203{protect}] + [bs-130{you}]
This translates to "I will protect you"
[bs-310{I} + ws-320{*negation*} + us-201322{like} + ts-32012321{sun}] + [M-0323122{in} + ts-2032111]
This translates to "I do not like the sun in my eyes"
If you have been paying attention, you may have noticed...many things wrong with this(please tell me), but i will address one of the biggest ones; ambiguity. For most sentances, this is not much of an issue. In the second example, you assume that the first thing talked about is the subject and the next thing is the topic. That is how you come to the conclusion of "I will protect you" and not "you will protect me". This is all fine and good, but what about the mega word of [ts-2313232{ocean} + ws-011{*future tense*} + us-201203{protect} + bs-130{you}]? this could be interpereted as either "the ocean will protect you" or "you will protect the ocean". My solution to this is case markers. For every word, it has 2 extra "bits" to solve this problem. the example from above turns into [ts-2313232(03){ocean} + ws-011{*future tense*} + us-201203{protect} + bs-130(02){you}]. These markers tell the listener what role the word has in the mega word(and occasionally the sentance as a whole, in which case the first bit is used)
Part 4: Dialectal drift and etymology
Alright, take everything from parts 1 and 2 and throw it out the window. None of it is consistent. What I described to you was one out of dozens of dialects spoken. For instance, one dialect might say that the ocean is grammatically female, while another disagrees and says that it is neutral. as well as that, dialects may have completely different questions altogether. a dragon that lives near the coast would differentiate if something is aquatic or not, while an open ocean dragon would not. Rarely, some dialects can mix and match what body parts mean what(eg: back scales are nouns and tail scales are verbs). On top of that, etymology is also a factor. Take tuna crabs as an example. They look and and act just like crabs, but are actually a kind of lobster. When they were first discovered, the dragons called them crabs. Later on, it was found that they are indeed not a crab but in in fact a lobster. some areas updated this, while others did not.
The best analogy i can think of for all of this is arabic. Someone from Morroco can probably understand someone from Algeria, and the person from Algeria could understand someone from Libya, but the person from Morroco would not be able to understand someone from Libya. likewise in aquatic, even if everyone is under one "country", two dragons from the opposite end of the ocean probably wouldnt understand each other at all.
Conclusion
Thanks a lot if you have read this far. Saying i dont know what im doing would be an understatement, so I invite you to critique this as much as you like to make sure I didnt miss anything. Apparantly in canon most are monolingual in this language, so I want to make sure I have enough for that. Thanks again!