Spoken languages

Azigh

Almost all people in Shra speak some variant of Azigh. There are many dialects, usually confined to a settlement. To the casual listener, these may often seem incompatible with each other, but when probed deeper all turn out to be Azigh. It is believed that all these variants derive from a primal language, yet its origins have been lost.

Aisih

The larynx of the surre, as well as their tongue, differ significantly from those of humans, so they have difficulty pronouncing voiced consonants. Over time, surre have developed their own speech, deriving words, grammar and idiom from Azigh. In Aisih this speech has diverged so much from its origins that it should be called a language of its own. Like Azigh, it houses many dialects.

Ahkrar

Ravens can speak Azigh even less well than surre, producing only croaks and squeakes. Nonetheless they have developed their own language, called Ahkrar, which mimics the human speech. The vocabulary and grammar are quite similar, though it lacks some words that the ravens have no use for and adds a whole range of aerial concepts that bipeds often fail to grasp.

Scripts

Lhuruf

Chroniclers and sages use the versatile Lhuruf alphabet, a phonetic script that more or less encompasses all phonemes known in Shra. Is covers both Azigh and Aisih. Besides them, most nobles are trained to read Lhuruf, though far fewer are able to write with it.
Though Lhuruf is used to write on soft surfaces like paper and parchment, its roots are in stone carving. It is a script that consists mostly of straight lines, like Earth cuneiform.

Merr

Alphabets are beyond the grasp of most people. They use more basic, logographic scripts. Merr is very popular with merchants. It has recognizable logograms for all kinds of trade goods, numbers and arithmetic. Other workers use variants that have been adapted to suit their own professions, but these lack unity. Each settlement has its own literary 'dialect' and sometimes several. Only Merr, which is constantly balanced among various settlements, is able to retain its status as 'lingua franca'.

Lah

Priests have the time and intellectual level to learn Lhuruf, but for religious reasons stick to a logographic script. This is not aligned to commerce, but to religion and mysticism. Some symbols are recognizable drawings of concrete concepts, others have been abstracted. The priests have constructed a complicated written language where a symbol can hint at several different meanings, often overlapping with others. Lah has several layers, the upper ones understandable by outsiders, the lower ones secret, reserved for the priests themselves. Here too there is one 'dialect' per settlement, only partially intelligible to priests of other locations.