Coalition Common Language

The standardized language across the entirety of the Coalition of Intelligent Organisms is CCL (Coalition Common Language). It is a diverse language that derives most of its structure and intricacies from Human languages, but, over time, as the Coalition expanded and incorporated numerous new alien races, it evolved considerably into a conglomeration of several alien dialects. Although a comprehensive set of basic phrases and grammatical rules exist within Coalition literary databases, the ways in which CCL is spoken vary greatly across Coalition space. The Coalition core zones, Kiracian Group, and eastern colonies are all known to have distinct variations of the language, complete with unique terms and grammatical styling. Within these dialects are countless sub-dialects, which can vary greatly in their complexity. In the most extreme cases, the variants of CCL spoken by the most remote colonies of the Coalition can be so radically different compared to those of the Coalition core zones that individuals from these two locations can barely understand each other. To avoid unnecessary confusion, most of the Coalition's inhabitants do their best to learn the baseline version of CCL spoken across most of the Coalition core zones in addition to their native dialects. This is especially important for people like merchants and politicians who frequently move between different areas of Coalition space. After the Galactic Revolution, tighter control of the Coalition's colonial holdings made many people more inclined to speak core zone dialects, which helped to eliminate some of these communication barriers.

CCL is written through both a phonetic alphabet (derived from the English language of the Human race), and a codex of logographs that represent specific objects and concepts (derived from East Asian languages of the Human race and numerous alien languages). In most situations, a combination of both the phonetic and logographic versions of the Coalition's written language are used, but there are occasions where only one version is used. The conciseness of Coalition logographs make them a frequent sight in advertising, signs and logos, but the lack of conjunctions and grammatical limitations of the system make it difficult to form complex sentences using only symbols. Most official records and important documents in the Coalition are written purely in the CCL alphabet to preserve clarity and avoid misinterpretation. While there are several thousand logographs officially cataloged by Coalition linguists, only a small percentage of them are actively used by most of the Coalition populace. Complex variants of this logographic writing system, which include conjunctions and new markings to allow the creation of longer sentences, exist in the more remote regions of Coalition space, particularly in the eastern colonies. However, these variants are rarely used by the Coalition majority and usually cannot be read by those that live outside of these regions.