Freni (language)
The language of the Freni Minor Race.
Speech consists mostly of trills, whistles, clicks, gurgles, and tonal humming. A Freni is capable of mimicking Human speech but often ends a sentence or word in a click or trill.
Grammar[edit]
Freni language often expresses concepts in terms of negation, emphasising what 'is not' rather than what 'is'.
Written Language[edit]
The language is written top-to-bottom, right-to-left. It is alphabetic, with 72 recognised phonemes, each of these represented by up to seven different characters usually determined by surrounding phonemes. These rules (and exceptions) can have cascading effects, making the language notoriously difficult to read for outsiders. There are 302 or 303 separate characters in Freni written languages. The 303rd, the seventh variant of a descending trill, is usually described by Freni scholars as a 'mistake'.
Social Use[edit]
The Freni have complicated distinctions between relatives, which do not translate well into Galanglic. When speaking Galanglic, a Freni will call all relatives within their immediate family 'sisters' if they are from the same generation, 'aunts' for all but their mother of the older generation, and 'great-aunts' for any generation beyond. The matriarch is always the 'old mother' even when she is the speaker's direct mother. Confusingly, all Freni outside the family with the same regional name are 'cousins' of the speaker, regardless of generation, unless they are a matriarch, in which case they are the 'old lady'.