Reconstrution of Runeterran Languages

Hiya,

I wanted to share the project I've been working on since October on the boards. I've posted countless posts over at reddit but I thought that the people here may find it interesting as well.

So, since October I have worked on rebuilding the lingusitic background of Runeterra. Riot has given us snippets of information (names, voicelines such as Karma's and Xayah's) and even Ornn's song. They've done a terrific job at creating sounds that sound foreign from our familiar English, but they don't appear to be fully functional languages just yet. I have a bachelor in Linguistics and have been trying to fill that gap in my spare time as a side project for fun.

It all began with figuring out how the different languages relate to eachother. After combining the related lore that I found I discovered that almost every language is related to one another, barring Freljordian and whatever the Yordles speak. This resulted in a language tree that can be found on the subreddit that I linked above (I don't think that I can post images here, I'm kinda new to the forums :.;)

Afterwards I began working on specific languages. Ionian has grown to a semi-functional language (though far from finished) that you can even learn for yourself. I've started working on Vastayan (a general language, not the tribe-specific dialects) since it's closely related to Ionian, and Freljordian since that's a language that lies to close to the languages that I already speak.

My dear friend Dynath has also joined the effort in rebuilding Shuriman and Targonian.

For example, by combining the voicelines of Karma we discovered that Ionian has singular and plural nouns, marks nominative and accusative case and has gender. Her voicelines can be broken up like this:

lav rian oon-ø vi fil-a weave together thread-P.ACC.NAT of tranquility-S.ACC.NAT 'weave the threads of tranquility'

gaaēn na kii-ri vi sa-ēra tear up wind-P.ACC.SPI of magic-S.ACC.SPI 'reap the winds of magic'

saa ēlēsa tē-ēra vi ji-a see first meaning-P.ACC.SPI of pain-ACC.NAT 'discover the meaning of pain'

I know that all these symbols are perhaps abit abstract, but I can't go into too much detail or this post will be very very long. I just mostly wanted to chat a little about the languages of Runeterra ^^. If you wanna read more in-depth information you can check out the subreddit or my reddit profile.

I hope that you found this, slightly random, post interesting.

Cheers, Nanna