Dwarvish

Dwarvish is the language primarily spoken by the Dwarvish race. It was the last of the common languages to arise, not being formed until the 7th century FE, and is the slowest evolving.

History

Dwark

When the Dwarvish race was first forming, a primordial form of the language arose in different populations.

Low Dwarvish

After the formation of the assimilation of the first Dwarvish civilizations, the different forms of dwark combined into a common language, mutating in the process. This combined language was standardized by Thork Stonebeard, a scholar who wrote a comprehensive dictionary and grammatical standardization, "Tekoch Buchorach Alt Seit" (The Structure and Form of Language), in 646 FE.

Middle Dwarvish

There is not firm distinction between Low and Middle Dwarvish, being mostly the result of Gronoic influence after the increase in global cultural exchange during the fourth millennium FE. While it borrowed heavily in vocabulary, its grammar and idioms remained very similar. The only notable structural change was the phasing out of "Ploch", a fourth grammatical gender which implied an object had a gender but this gender was unknown or undefined (like the singular "they" in English). Gronoic has no concept for this (having only the genders male, female, and neuter), and as more words were incorporated into the language its use declined. Its primary etymological remnant is "bik", the gender-ambiguous pronoun.

High Dwarvish

High Dwarvish emerged as a