Zetylic

Zetylic is the official language of the Zetylian Hegemony, and the language that was spoken by almost all Zetylians before the Hegemony collapsed. Originally invented by Serphiad xenolinguists, Zetylic was designed to be a highly adaptive yet easy to learn language, based on a simple grammatical structure and selection of words. It was hoped that the standardization of Zetylic on these rules would help unify the ways in which the language was spoken/written across the entirety of the Zetylian Hegemony, thereby improving the cohesion of the Zetylian species. While there was a minor amount of deviation that emerged as time went on, Zetylic fulfilled this purpose rather well, experiencing vastly less linguistic drift compared to the languages of many other interstellar civilizations. This ensured Zetylians from anywhere in the Hegemony could communicate with each other easily, and is a crucial, yet often overlooked, contributor to the Hegemony's political and economic stability.

Zetylic is written using a phonetic alphabet that includes basic consonants and vowels, as well as special characters used to indicate more complex sounds formed through specific combinations of the basic characters. These phonetic shorthands simplify the formation of Zetylian words, although they are not always used. In terms of grammar, Zetylic is strikingly similar to the English language of the Humans, as anything beyond its basic conventions of grammar (which include the prefacing of sentences with tense indicator words and the organization of nouns towards the end of a sentence) are fluid and subject to interpretation.