Language

Due to literally being one Bauhinian Empire for thousands of years, everyone on the continent speaks one language. Though topolects and accents exist, the foundations of them are the same, and they always remain mutually intelligible. Here is all the info on the language!

Contents

History
Features
Accents

History

Ancient Bauhinian is split into two forms: Noble Bauhinian and Common Bauhinian (think Latin and Vulgar Latin). Modern Bauhinian is developed from Common Bauhinian, while Noble Bauhinian is taught as a school subject to torture students all over the continent. In most places, these two languages (the old Noble one and the modern one) are now called Ancient Bauhinian and Modern Bauhinian now, to rid the idea of an aristocrat-exclusive language, although in Fanton they still call it Noble and Common Bauhinian.

As far as we're concerned, there existed 3 languages on the continent:

Noble Bauhinian, used mainly by aristocrats, has extensive written records and documents
Common Bauhinian, no written documents until pretty late; linguists can only speculate on how it sounded like further back
Modern Bauhinian, spoken by everyone now, developed from Common

Features

Here are some important features of Bauhinian:

It is very specific and precise when talking about objective things. Evidentiality (saw with your own eyes? heard from someone trustworthy? untrustworthy? inferred it?), when exactly an event happened (historical event? just happened like hot news? happened early in your life?), etc.

However, it's insanely vague when it comes to subjective stuff. "I want to be in bed with you 25 hours a day and have ten billion children^[1]" and "I like you as a normal acquaintance. I might say hello to you on the street if I'm feeling nice" are literally expressed the same way (roughly "we're on good terms with each other" in English), and there's no way around it unless you want to resort to literally saying "please have ten billion children with me" which just makes you sound perverted.

But there are like a billion terms ranging from "this person annoys me" to "this person is my arch-nemesis."

Questions are worded completely differently when in normal contexts and in interrogations. Grammatically they are called "asking questions" and "requesting information," respectively. Exams are usually worded like "asking questions," except the exams at Ministry Affiliate which like the tone of "requesting information."

There are a shitton of different ways to say someone died, depending on the identity of said dead person and the way they died.

Has a shitton of levels of formal, ranging from speaking down to someone, to speaking to the emperor.

Clauses, like because/so, if/then, and but, have the words attached to an individual word in the sentence rather than decorating the entire clause, so changing where the word is attached might slightly change the meaning. Take "Sparky got berated because she ate the curtains" as an example. "Sparky got berated-effect, she ate-cause the curtains" is the common interpretation here, since eating (rather than playing with or pulling) the curtains got her berated. But if it was "…she ate the curtains-cause," that implies they were in the middle of lunch maybe so eating was fair game, and she just ate the wrong things. This may be completely genius or laughably impractical and I think it's paramount to my failure that I don't know which.

Accents

Bauhinian: Literally the standard! I like to imagine they sound like the British.
Fantoni: Quite similar to Bauhinian, except they often mix up *n*s and *l*s. May pronounce "nat" as "lat," for example.
Atlasian: Likes to drag out their *i*s, making all of them long. "Filip" becomes "feeeeeleeeeep!"
Westavian: tba
Morelandian: Softens *t*s into *d*s like them yankees. "Ata" and "ada" are the same in their mouths.
Sylvandian: tba

Halcyon behavior