History of the Vekleic Language

The first variation of the Vekleic language formed in-between the years of 650 and 740. Originally, Vekleic was a Runic vertical script—shown in the recreation below. 

Due to the very sparse nature of early Vekleic language usage, the script split into many separate forms very quickly. Instead of looking into every minority version of this language, we will now follow the closest common ancestor of modern standard Vekleic (named Classical Vekleic). This earliest ancestor is Ancient Quendic—now referred to more broadly as Ancient Vekleic. The biggest change compared to its runic past was the very intentional switch from vertical to semi-vertical, something that has stuck as a trademark of the language even today. Now, each character is written as a three-part “syllable” which is made up of three or fewer sounds. These sounds are read from top to bottom, and the next character is read to the right of it. Below is an example of Ancient Vekleic (it is also important to note that the straight edges of the runes were gradually altered to be more curved).

This so-called “Ancient Vekleic” was common primarily inside the Quendic Kingdom from 3140 to about 3340, during the early Khefenelan Empire. The switch from Ancient Vekleic to Classical Vekleic was a semi-successful policy of the Khefenelan Empire. Classical Vekleic was a script optimized by a famous Vekleic high priest. In order to promote the integration of the vast amount of cultures across the empire, Classical Vekleic was implemented as the official national language. Most regions with already integrated cultures had no trouble integrating; however, the southern and eastern groups with already distinct languages had trouble effectively doing so. Below is an example of Classical Vekleic. 

The southern tribes didn’t previously have a script for writing language, and even before the nationalization of language, they hardly used Ancient Vekleic. This proved for a very difficult challenge in educating them of the new and much more complicated script. Instead, scholars in the south, somewhat out of rebellious activity, created a simplified version of the script. Interestingly, this version of the script reverted back to the ancient vertical format. In the east, many had already been using a lot of different tribal scripts—which the history of is in need of a separate document. Instead of fully integrating Classical Vekleic, they merged traditional scripts with the new mandate. This resulted in a purely cursive version of Classical Vekleic, completely abandoning the trademark semi-verticality of the script. Below, on the left, is an example of the southern script. On the right is an example of the eastern script.