Ilogari

The language of a northern realm that rests cold and rotting, waiting to be lost to time.

"I did precisely what you asked. You repeated it three times, I heard you clearly." "You misunderstood me, is what you did."
— Exchange between a native Savelan and an Ilogari traveler

Ilogari is the language of the people who reside in Ba'Logor, spoken rarely in the lands beyond.

Language of an Age Past

The language of the far north is one that is not often heard nor seen by most; even those who make the journey to Ba'Logor may only catch some few traces of the language should they cross paths with a native, or stumble upon a monument lost to time.

Native to

Ba'Logor

Speakers

Ilogari

Alphabet

Syllabary

Tightly Kept Culture

Most speakers of Ilogari speak other languages, and will avoid using their native tongue with outsiders out of cultural principle.

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Tongue of the Dawn

The Ilogari live their lives with the sun as their guide, and thus have developed many words and phrases which directly correspond to different times of day, the passage of time, positions of the sun, and many forms of day and nightfall. Holding the cycle of day and night in such high regard, and referring to it so frequently through their idioms in every language they speak has resulted in many folk adopting the Ilogari idioms as they share lands with one another, the idioms lingering long after the Ilogari journey back to their homelands.

Sunwalker Script

The written word of Ilogari is a simple syllabic language, its glyphs plain enough to read on their own once a reader memorizes their sounds. The difficulty in learning, however, lies in its grammatical modifiers. Glyphs, as written, may have their sounds or meanings altered by an assortment of modifying strokes, some representing dawn or dusk to signify times of day, others adding visual representations of light and dark to signal severity or urgency.

Cyclical Speech

The spoken word of Ilogari has been compared, by some, to skipping records due to a pattern of speech which results in many words being repeated once or twice within the same statement as a way of conferring tense and the passage of time. Much like the language's script is modified to signify important details such as time or urgency, these same words are repeated with modifications as needed to alter their meaning and add context native speakers will understand.

Context Lost in Repetition

The Ilogari pattern of speech sometimes appears when the Ilogari people speak in other tongues, not fully understanding that other tongues lack the same mechanic of shifting or adding context to their words through repetition. Because of this, many Ilogari travelers find themselves misunderstood when others assume their repetition is for emphasis and lacks other meaning.

Entry for Worldbuilding Summer Camp 2025

Answering: "An ancient tongue from which many common idioms spring"

Visit strixxline's Competition Page Check all other answers to this prompt Competition Homepage

Winner of the Most Beautiful World and Cartography Award (2022) and the Wondrous Nature Award (2024)!

Cover image: by Strixxline

Metadata

Article template

Language

World

Malkora

Comments

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Sage eccbooks

Jul 7, 2025 00:26 by E. Christopher Clark

Thanks for sharing this with me over on the Discord. I love how you've built a language here without doing a whole conlang. This is a great example of how one might do that.

Councilor of the Inner Sanctum strixxline

Jul 7, 2025 02:30 by Polina "Line" Arteev

Conlangs are so COOL but they're also HARD and TIME CONSUMING, and also totally not needed for worldbuilding languages! (Though I will say a dictionary is always delicious to see... maybe one day!)

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Seek a new dawn, in Malkora!
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Grandmaster Keon Croucher

Jul 7, 2025 13:52 by Keon Croucher

This is in fact the way, I never have and never will conlang. I don't want to, I'd rather set indirect narrative expectations, weave thoughts and descriptions and allow the reader/player/GM to consider and perhaps decide how things sound or what spoken words might sound like should they need them. I just prefer the flexibility :) That said I love this example Line, its fantastic and most certainly getting tucked both in my collection, and into a pocket to use as inspiration for the language article when I get to mine!

Keon Croucher, Chronicler of the Age of Revitalization

Councilor of the Inner Sanctum Serukis

Jul 9, 2025 21:15 by Dr Emily Vair-Turnbull

Love this. I can see why people would misunderstand them. Even when speaking a different language, it would be hard to get those temporal and grammatical norms out of your head.

Emy x
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Ilogari

The language of a northern realm that rests cold and rotting, waiting to be lost to time.