Chahi

Language spoken in the Free Lands; lit. means "mix."

Overview

When the world began to fall apart, those in the north were the first to suffer. The tundra became utterly hostile to life, driving seal hunters and ice-fishers to the seas. Inhabitants of the northern plains fled into the ancestral homelands of Anishinabe and Algonquin peoples. Soon enough, even those regions became uninhabitable and new migrations began. When the Anishnabe surged away from the encroaching climate disasters, they took southward routes through eastern forests and western plains. The brutal trek east through thick forests left few survivors. Those who made their way to the coasts, by and large, assimilated into the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The west was an entirely different story. The rivers teamed with travellers, and entire villages trudged across the plains. An ocean of Anishnabe arrived in the great mound-cities of the Great Plains.

These refugees needed to find a niche to fill, and one soon became apparent. While their sudden presence served as a shock to the Cahokian economy, the networks they maintained throughout their dispersion made them excellent go-betweens and traders. In the first generation, peaceful cohabitation required a common tongue, and Anishnabe refugees picked up Lakota words, pronouncing them in their own way. Cahokian Chahi speakers picked up Numu words, and more far-ranging traders brought back goods from distant shores and the words used to describe them. Today, Chahi is a living language, incorporating words and features from every corner of Makasing and beyond.

Phonology

Vowels

Chahi has 6 vowels: 3 short vowels and 3 long vowels. Vowels that follow nasal consonants are nasalized. The short vowels are i, o, and a. The long vowels are ii, oo, and aa. There are no diphthongs in Chahi (also known as a gliding vowel, such the ai in air). When a Chahi speaker encounters two different vowels in a row (such as in Cahokia), they naturally insert a brief pause, giving space for a new syllable. If you want to get advanced, pronounce vowels before nasal consonants including n, ng, or m through your nose (nasalized).

	Front	Central	Back
Close	/ɪ/ /i:/		/u:/
Mid	/e/		/o/
Low		‘ /a:/

They are written and pronounced as follows:

Short Vowels:

• /ɪ/ i ' as in b'it

• /o/ o as in soft

• /e/ a as in may

Long Vowels

• /i:/: ii as in peek

• /u:/ oo' ' as in book

• /a:/ aa' as in ‘aaah'‘

Consonants

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Velar	Glottal
Nasals		m	n		ng
Plosives/ Affricates	Voiceless	p	t	ch	k	‘
	Voiced	b	d		g
Fricative	Voiceless		s	sh		h
	Voiced		z	zh
Approximant			l	y	w

Chahi has 18 consonant sounds, seen in the table above (consult the International Phonetic Alphabet for more details on each sound). 17 of these sounds are used as letters.

Syllables

Vowels and consonants are the building blocks of syllables, and syllables are the building blocks of words. Most syllables in Chahi are very simple - a consonant followed by a vowel (cha, wo, soo, zhi). In linguistic terms, the syllable structure is typically (v)CV, meaning acha, isoo, or oozhi can also be found in the language. Chahi allows relatively few consonant clusters. The consonant clusters you might find within a word include sp', shp, sht, zg, zh, zhd, mb, ng, nz, or nzh.

Stress

In general, the second syllable of the word is stressed.

Nouns

Chahi features prefixes, suffixes, and infixes - meaning units of meaning can be put in front of, at the end of modify meanings. These affixes can be used to derive new words by indicating that a word is plural, a location, an agent, possessed by someone, or a kind of berry (or something else small and globular). In addition to the listed affixes, words can be combined to create new words. For example, gamoo ' means cat and thanka ' means big, and gaamoothanka means big cat, or cougar.‘

Prefixes

Chahi		Example	Meaning
Ni-	First Person Possessive	Taazi: Nitaazi	Dog: My dog/Our dog
Gi-	Second Person Possessive	Taazi: Gitaazi	Dog: Your dog
O-	Third person possessive	Taazi: Otaazi	Dog: His dog/Their dog
G-	Verb to noun (participle)	Nibaan: Ginibaan	To Sleep: Sleeping
Wa- Wo-	Actor/Agent	Postan: Wapostan Oyuspa: Wayusapa	To put on the head: Hat To Seize: Police

Suffixes

Chahi	English	Example	Meaning
-pi	Plural for some words (Primarily Lakota-derived words)'	Thi: Thipi	House: Houses
-n	Plural (Inanimate)	Shawaka: Shawakan	Desert: Deserts
-ta	At, on, or in	Paha: Pahata	Hill: On the hill
-ang	Location, Land, Town	Paha: Pahaang	Hill: Hilly land
-an	Actor/Agent	Zagabaa: Zagabaan	To Hack: Hacker
-ns	Diminutive	Taazi: Taazins	Dog: Puppy
-min	Berry, Small, Globular	Wiyaa: Wiyamin	Meatball
-ban	Absent, Dead	Daadoo: Daadooban	Grandfather: Late Grandfather

Verbs

Chahi verbs are marked for:

• Person: Who does the thing

• Object: Who the thing happens to

• Tense: When the thing is done

In addition, there are a handful of special suffixes that can modify the meaning of verbs.

Person/Object

English	Chahi	English Example	Chahi Example
I/We (inclusive) We (exclusive)	Ni- Ni-aki	I/We (inclusive) Find We (exclusive) Find I/We find myself/ourselves	Nimika Nimikak Ninimikaki
You/Y’all	Gi-	You/Y’all Find I/We Find You/Y’all	Gimika Nigimika
He/She/They It/They	Wi-wag Wi-	He/She/They Find It/They Find I/We Find Him/Her/It/Them	Winibaawag Winibaa Niwimika

Tense

English	Chahi	English Example	Chahi Example
Past	-ba-	I/We Slept	Nibanibaa
Present	n/a	I/We Sleep	Ninibaa
Future	-tii-	He/She/They Will Sleep	Nitiinibaa

Misc. Suffixes

Chahi	English	Example	Meaning
-aan	Imperitive	Nibaan	Go to sleep!
-kin	Prohibitive	Nibaakin	Don’t sleep!

Verbs as Nouns/Adjectives

Verbs play a very important role in Chahi, and the line between verbs and other types of words can be blurry. For instance, many places in Cahokia have names that mean something like ‘we do this thing together.’ A restaurant might be a place where we eat together, a tattoo parlor might be named something that literally means ‘we tattoo together.’ In addition, rather than saying that a thing is red, in Chahi, the literal translation would be something along the lines of ‘the thing is reddend.’ line-height:115%;

Word Order

Because so much information is encoded in verbs, word order is relatively free - that is, words tend to be placed in order of importance. However, the language does default to Subject-Object-Verb. Instead of saying ‘The crow flew home,’ you’d say ‘The crow home flew.’

Example

In the sample sentence below, you can see many of the elements we’ve discussed interacting with each other.

Kag patoon yadadoo nadadoo wibabiinzo wibabiinzo, hangapiban dibishkoo kag hangapi, naadag wibathiyatawag yahopi.

In the days before your grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather, Crow flew home to her nest on a night much like tonight.

Author’s Note

What follows is a description of the language that serves as a first language for many people of diverse heritage, the most common spoken language in Cahokia, and a trade language used across Makasing. Obviously, in the world of Coyote & Crow, Chahi would not be written using latin letters. In order to help you pronounce the language well, a written system has been devised so that (for the most part!) Chahi is pronounced as a monolingual anglophone would read it. However, if you have a background in Indigenous languages (particularly Anishinabe, more commonly known as Ojibwe), you’ll have a bit of a leg up in understanding some of the nuances. If you’re at all familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, you’ll recognize the symbols in slashes (such as /a/ or /ʒ/) as phonemes - a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another. If you’re not familiar with the IPA, that’s okay - just know that each symbol surrounded by slashes represents a certain sound that may or may not appear in English. More importantly, different regions may have different pronunciations of a particular sound - so if your ‘accent’ is off, don’t worry. That’s how language grows!

Chahi is a creole - a language formed when two or more languages collide, blending some elements and eliminating others. Often, aspects of pronunciation and grammar unfamiliar in one of the mother languages will be eliminated, as will various grammatical irregularities, and a ‘pidgin’ language is formed. As that pidgin is used by multiple generations of people trying to work with each other, it is taught to children, used in unexpected ways, and takes on features from the languages it interacts with. This process of linguistic evolution takes a pidgin to a creole - and over time, something totally distinct from its mother languages.

In Coyote and Crow, the roots of Chahi began to grow some 2,000 years ago. While most of the core vocabulary comes from Lakota, with a smaller set of words coming from Anishnabe, it’s use in Cahokia also brought in words from Numu Tekwapu, and contact with the other nations introduced loanwords from Dine Bizaad and Tsalagi Gawonihisdi.

In some cases, a long process of determining how a word wormed its way up to Cahokia was completed. In others, a writer or developer’s particular affinity with a specific Indigenous language led to the adoption of a particular word or phrase. Our languages are medicine: they are living testaments to the resilience of our people, bearers of history, culture, and intergenerational wisdom. They are also experiencing a beautiful period of rebirth, as communities reclaim the heritage that was forcibly ripped away - sometimes by government decree, sometimes by social pressure or discrimination. We encourage you to seek out the Indigenous languages spoken in the land you live in, and participate in their reclamation. Take lessons, donate to their recovery efforts, and advocate for the organizations in your area that are working to teach Indigenous languages to the next generation. From Michif to Inuit, Eskimo Trade Jargon to Cherokee, Tongva to Taino, beautiful languages with fascinating features have been spoken on this continent for uncountable generations. We hope that they are spoken for many more. Meegwetch.

Design Considerations

The aesthetics and mechanics of Chahi aren’t made up out of whole cloth - they’re derived from real-world Indigenous languages. The following considerations were used to create a new language that paid respect to our cultures and was usable for our players.

Chahi has several features meant to evoke Indigeneity:

• Double-vowel writing system: In Coyote and Crow materials, Chahi is written using a system reminiscent of Ojibwe’s.

• Animate/Inanimate grammatical gender: While many romance languages categorize words as masculine or feminine, other languages (like Algonquian and Athabaskan) mark words as animate or inanimate - which can sometimes reflect cultural concepts of what is considered alive.

• Mixed Language: Chahi is a Mixed Language - one that developed from the intersection of multiple peoples incorporating aspects of their own tongues. There are many Indigenous parallels - including Michif, Chinook Trade Jargon, and Kaqchikel-K'iche'.

• Vocabulary: Many Chahi words can be traced back to Ojibwe, Lakota, Cherokee, or Numu Tekwapu, among others.

We’re also aware that many of our readers - even Indigenous ones - do not speak and may not have encountered the languages of the continent they live on before. The following features help make the language accessible for everyone while maintaining an Indigenous character:

• Simplified spelling and writing system: For the most part, Chahi can be pronounced the way it looks. We don’t use characters some real-world Indigenous languages use that aren’t used in English. Some features common in Indigenous languages (like differentiating consonants based on aspiration) but alien to English speakers have been left out.

• Emotionally resonant words: While we’ve tried to maintain verisimilitude and kept consistent rules, we’ve also bent them from time to time to bring in words like Mahiz or Cahokia that might not make sense from an in-universe perspective, but will resonate with the players.

• Minimized English influences: The in-universe writing system isn’t an alphabet, and we’ve created a grammatical system so that Chahi isn’t just a relex of English.