Any Rioters able to tell me some languages of Runeterra??

Bonnìe·3/7/2018, 12:42:10 AM·1 votes·1,905 views

As someone who loves the world building lore and is a foreign language and linguistics major,

Can someone help me understand if our real world languages exist on Runeterra?

MF's exo sang in russian, Fiora has a french accent, Yasuo speaks something japanese sounding "ancient ionian dialect". Karma speaks an "ancient ionian dialect". the way to form rek'sai and the name kassadin are ancient shuriman.

I mean aside from English, do languages such as French and Japanese exist in this world?

Are there languages particular to each region and dialects across them?

Is this an aspect of lore and world building thats been looked into?

I don't expect riot to create an extensive conlang for each "country" but i am interested in the idea of this for my personal sanic oc champion concepts, as I call them.

I know Ezreal is an archaeologist so I imagine there is higher education and specialization to pursue, so I'd think there would be some form of anthropology or linguistics to study in the realm of runeterra.

Any deeper information on runeterran languages would be appreciated.

even if its saying its possible for lets say a shuriman to go to university and learn a bilgewater dialect or something. idk.

7 Comments

RiotBioluminescence3/7/2018, 1:11:47 AM5 votes

There has been some small amount of info given on the various languages of Runeterra, but not as much detail as folks would like.

  • The Buhru (Illaoi's people) have their own language - you'll find a few of Illaoi's lines are in that language, and words like "paylangi" which mean outsider.
  • Here's WAAARGHbobo with some guidelines on the Buhru language.
  • The fairly recent teaser for Ornn had his legend sung in Ancient Freljordian.
  • The Path to Hearth-Home
  • Xayah and Rakan speak a few lines of a Vastayan language (I'm not sure which one). Allegedly Xayah's accent/pronounciation is really poor though, so beware.
  • You already know about various Void related things having Ancient Shuriman inspired names.
    • "Sai" means desert. "Rek" means queen. "Xer" means little devil. These are simplifications!
  • There's also Ur-Nox, a very old, Noxian language, though there hasn't been much released about it yet.

Hope that helps a little.