View source for Lántun

The '''Lántun''' language is a part of  a macrofamily of languages generally called Aiwanic, although it is not spoken by a humanoid race. They are characterised by polysynthetic morphology, pitch accent and lack of true labial consonants and vowels.

The Lánunic languages are a contiguous dialectal block, with the exception of some small obscure dialects spoken at the fringes of the known world.  The terms “Lántun” and “Lánunic” are often used interchangeably by linguists studying this language, but the former is more typically used to mean the central standardised dialect, while the latter refers to the language continuum as a whole. The name '''Lántun''' is the endonym of the language, meaning “a collective of words”. The beings themselves do not have self-designations (autonyms) in their language yet they are called “the Draconids” or “Dragons” in English; they do however frequently have specific names for local groups and their dialects, as the local group was more important culturally than larger relations for this species.

From a synchronic perspective, the Lánunic languages are considered to be dead, as they were spoken during the [[w:Electroweak epoch|Second Era]] of the Universe (while this Era is the Fourth), so there are no any living speakers left. Yet, the language represented a very distant ancestor to all Aiwanic and possibly even some other languages. There is no evidence that would support any relation to the languages of the Fourth Era planet Earth (the [[Kyrdan languages]] are confirmed to be Aiwanic, though).

Salishan languages are most commonly represented using the Latin alphabet in a phonetic notation that accounts for the various vowels and consonants that do not exist in Latin or English, while some letters have a different designated sound than expected. Many Dragon groups evolved various writing systems for their language, and while technically Lántun is viewed as “standard” in this article, there was no single standard variety of Lánunic.