Old Fang

The very first werewolves in America were, of course, Indigenous werewolves. As such, the earliest language known in the "New World" was that spoken by the elder Indigenous werewolves, whose language was adapted from their human counterparts, along whom they lived side by side without incident for thousands of years before the first European werewolves arrived on their land and brought their own languages with them.

These newly-arriving werewolves, coming to the Americas in the early 11th century, brought with them a new tongue: Old Norse, a language shared with the humans of the Old Country. While the werewolf tribes of the Americas at the time chased the human settlers back to their own country, they embraced the new werewolves as their own and shared their language. Soon, the two tongues were used in combination, creating from the human languages a new language used only by werewolves.

This soon became a sacred spiritual language used by the werewolves, and it would not change for another 700 years, when the first wolves from the New Europe first arrived in the Americas from Scotland and Ireland, bringing the Gaelic languages with them. While at first Scots-Gaelic and Irish combined to create a separate language for these new settlers, over time the werewolf language developed into what became known as "Old Fang," a language that combined languages of the Indigenous nations of the Americas with Norse and Gaelic.

However, as werewolves were increasingly forced to adopt human personas in order to avoid detection, they learned to speak the language of the territories in which they lived, with various dialects of English, French, and Spanish being the most common. The old language was lost to time, with only a handful of spiritual leaders still able to speak it fluently.

As of 1946, few young werewolves learn Old Fang unless they are marked as spiritual leaders. The language is considered "endangered" by its people.

Most werewolf religions are deeply ancestral, which is one of the few things that keeps Old Fang alive -- for the time being. It is well-known that the older a werewolf is and the more spiritually touched they are, the more of the old language they are able to speak. Some believe this to be a spiritual gift, while others maintain that with age, each picks up more and more of the language, often learning intuitively based on the known idioms and expanding their usage from there.

Veiltenders conduct their ceremonies in complex Old Fang, and youngsters use the idioms, often without knowing their origins.

Wolves able to speak Old Fang properly are marked as either highly educated or highly traditional, even though some learn it as a hobby or simply to keep the traditions alive. Mispronouncing Old Fang is considered a disrespect to the ancestors, and so youngsters are always corrected -- sometimes harshly -- when they fail to speak it correctly.