Kanal · Latch · Span · Switch
Four languages
What each language means to the people who use it, as the novels show it: at the market, on the record, in the yards and between people who trust each other.
The Mud, in DISSONANCE · 1,348 dictionary entries
Kanal
Kanal is home. People in the Mud use it at the bench, at the market and over a sick child, and switch into the Counter’s English only for officials, forms and the Board. Choosing Kanal draws a line: a thing said in Kanal “stayed on their side of the room”, and at the fish tables the price is lower if you ask for it in Kanal. Some of what the Desk says cannot be put into Kanal at all without sounding like a joke.
Older languages run under it: Kreyòl, “Kanal’s older sister”, the Cajun French of the drowned prairie, Vietnamese and Spanish from the market. The pump crews still keep time with work songs in words older than Kanal.
How Kanal is built
Kanal is the spoken language of the Mud. The standard English of the Canopy is what its speakers switch into for officials, forms and the Board.
Liberty and the Commonwell, in The Fourth Rail · 536 dictionary entries
Latch
Latch says who has checked a thing. A speaker marks whether she checked it alone (se), whether two people checked it together (ket) or whether it is only a report she received (lo). Nothing is confirmed until two people have checked it “with both their eyes on the same page”, and leaving the mark off says as much as a word.
Plant operators talk to themselves in Latch so that they will remember what they saw and when. People who are exact and brief with strangers keep humor and silence for the people they trust.
How Latch is built
Latch is the spoken language of Liberty and the Commonwell. The object comes before mu and the verb comes last; checks are marked (se checked by me, ket checked jointly, lo received report), and replies are tay (taken up), nay (refused) and hala (pause).
Gotham, in The Fourth Rail · 597 dictionary entries
Span
In Span a careful speaker puts the event first and the source last: seen, reported, inferred. Saying where you know something from is part of saying it, so a claim with no source sounds to a Gotham officer “as loud as a shout”. Guardians use full Service Span when they want their words on record.
We is a serious word in Span. It names who is inside it and how you know, and a we the other person has not agreed to “made a debt in her name”. Imperial Standard, the war office’s English, is what officials use “when they want to sound like nobody in particular”.
How Span is built
Span is the spoken language of Gotham. Telling, dispatch and service speech put the event first and the source at the end (dek seen, rel reported, vesh inferred, bar unspecified); household and street speech is moving toward the speaker first. Imperial Standard, the war office’s English, is the switch.
Garden, in The Fourth Rail · 177 dictionary entries
Switch
Switch is the language of the Garden yards, built like a yard record: the object, its condition, whose hand, what permission, what next, where it came from. Cousins raised in the yards use it for jokes, describing a cold supper in yard grammar.
It can also carry what is too hard to tell any other way. One man tells the worst of the summer in Switch, object and condition and hand, “because it was the only way he could get it out in order”.
How Switch is built
Switch is the spoken language of Garden. The object comes before ke and the verb comes last. The yard record voice gives object, condition, whose hand, permission, next work and provenance (trak, blank-trak, kros-trak).
Across the corridor
When people from different Strongholds meet, each speaks their own language and the corridor’s habit of checking, called Threefold, carries the meaning across: where a thing came from, whether it was understood, and what state it is in. The book keeps each speaker in their own language, as the corridor does.
The dictionaries
2,658 words in four dictionaries, each with the spelling, a pronunciation guide and the English meaning. You do not need any of them to read the novels: the story carries what matters. The languages were made for the books, and their forms are not the speech of any living community. Readers who know Louisiana Creole or Haitian Kreyòl will recognize family resemblances in Kanal, and should not take it as a representation of either.