Beastspeech

Beastspeech

Script	None - spoken and gestural
Family	New World trade tongue
Primary speakers	The beastfolk of the New World
Region	The New World

Overview

Beastspeech is the shared trade tongue of the beastfolk of the New World - the simple, common register that lets otherwise isolated peoples bargain, parley, and pass warnings across the continent. Few of these peoples speak the Common of the old world; instead, almost every beastfolk learns Beastspeech alongside their own ancestral tongue, making it the closest thing the New World has to a lingua franca.

It arose not from any single nation but from countless small contacts between hunting territories, warrens, and caravans. Because of this, it is broad but shallow: rich enough to trade hides, name a danger, or strike a truce, but ill-suited to poetry, law, or abstract thought - for those, each people keeps its own language.

Phonology & Script

Beastspeech is overwhelmingly oral and gestural, with no native writing system; meaning rides as much on posture, scent-marking, and gesture as on sound. Its vocabulary leans toward the concrete: prey and predator, water and shelter, kin and stranger, trade and threat.

Speakers

Beastspeech is spoken alongside a native ancestral tongue by nearly every people of the New World, including:

• Canidae (wolf-folk) - who also speak Canidae
• Caprini (goat-folk) - who also speak Caprini
• Bejorn (bear-folk) - who also keep their own ursine speech
• Felixpes (rabbit-folk) - who also speak Felixpes
• Ludai (slug-folk) - who also speak Ludain, a pheromonal chemical language
• Thanoi (walrus-folk) - who also speak Thanoi
• Reepicheep (mouse-folk) - who also speak Squeak Speak
• Grung (frog-folk) - who also speak Grung

Lore

Because Beastspeech is the only tongue most beastfolk share with outsiders, the explorers of Acadia - the first old-world settlement in the New World - learned it before any native language. To the settlers it was proof that the beastfolk, however strange, were peoples to be parleyed with rather than beasts to be hunted.

Appendix

See Also

• Races of the New World
• Common - the old-world counterpart

Sources & Attribution

• Primary lore: the Languages traits of the New World species in editions/5e-2014/species/ (Traveler’s Guide - Foray into the New World), author TrueMichato.
• Supporting lore: content/General/Races of the New World.md.

Languages

Languages

Languages of Thelemar

Common & Dialects	Common Lexalian Olympian Jaknian Clairnian Hubian Old Common
Exotic Tongues	Skyspeak Mictlānian Jötunn Gob Trunkodon Felis Minotaur Beastspeech
Planar & Ancient	Draconic Sylvan Stygian Primordial Celestial

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