Dzenic languages

Dzenic
Nywic, Tywic
Geographic distribution	Polykariote-Eukariote Limes
Linguistic classification	One of Sparkalia's primary language families.
Proto-language	Proto-Dzenic
Subdivisions	Chinuyan Dze-Nywan Ngighic Thurian Tsanic Zungan
ISO 639-5	dze

The Dzenic Languages, also known as Nywic or Tywic, are a language family native to the Dze species and the P.E.L. in where this race inhabits. Divided into 6 sub-branches, they comprise over 100 extant languages and several liturgical or extinct ones, the most famous of all being Old Dze and the other Old Liturgicals; these languages are all descended from an ancient, reconstructed, Proto-Dzenic language spoken in the early Paleolithic Age in the Leaf Lance Valley and the surrounding areas, associated mainly with the Leaf Lance Culture. By the time written records had begun however, the Dzenic Languages had expanded all across the P.E.L. and had branched out into several, liturgical, mutually un-intelligible variants. Written evidence in the form of the Old Liturgicals appears tens of thousands of years after the hypothesized era in which Proto-Dzenic emerged, with these languages being from the Late Chalcolithic Era.

However, due to the cultural conservativeness of the Dze, which extends to a linguistic conservativeness, the culture and religion, among other aspects, has been fairly easy to reconstruct. The Dzenic family is important to sparkalian linguistics, specially the field of historical linguistics, as it possesses the longest recorded history of any language family, as well as the largest linguistic cultural heritage of any race or civilization. The Dzenic languages are also not related to any other language family, being spoken exclusively by the Dze species.

Name

In current scholarship, the term "Dzenic" is the most widely used, as it comes from the Proto-Dzenic *d͡zɛ, meaning "stargazer", which is the most common endonym the species as a whole uses; however, terms like Nywic or Tywic, coming from the words for "people" and "person" respectively, have been proposed as alternative names, with the former being rarely used due to the Dze-Nywan branch already using the term for one of the sub-branches.

Classification

The Dzenic Languages are unique in that they originate from a species that is not related to humans and that arose in a very specific area, with the language being seemingly the one ancestral language for the whole species, which has led to the proposition that Dzenic, along with being renamed to either of the two proposals stated above, was not the only language spoken by the species, with Solarian linguists believing certain features of Proto-Dzenic, and specially of it's daughter languages, to come from various substrata rather than being native features; this is widely rejected nontheless due to archaeological and genetic evidence.

There are six main branches of the Dzenic Languages, listed below in alphabetical order:

• Chinuyan.
• Dze-Nywan.
• Ngighic.
• Thurian.
• Tsanic.
• Zungan.