The World of the Antarcticon
Welcome to my far future, ice-free Antarctica, known for now as the “Continent”! This is the setting I'm working on for a future epic fantasy series, code named "The Antarcticon".
The climate, flora and fauna are all unique, and may have been intentionally engineered by a precursor civilization, through science and/or magic. That precursor civilization, human or otherwise, did leave behind artifacts, including a massive basalt tower at the location of the South Pole.
The world is suffused with many types of magics, deriving from the auroras, the stars, and a variety of spirits from other dimensions.
Monotreme mammals dominate the land (except for humans and a few other placental mammals) all laying eggs and having beaks or bills, but filling the ecosystem niches of placental or marsupial mammals in our world. A monotreme sentient race also exists in several of the large lake and wetland regions.
Similarly, penguins have speciated into several types of (still-)flightless birds, from large and dangerous terrorbirds, to a domesticated chicken analogue.
The climate is temperate overall, with equivalents of our temperate deciduous forests and temperate rainforests the most common, except due to elevation. The flora is unique as well, with a wide variety of mosses, lichens, and fungi filling most niches of plants, except for varieties and descendants of our world’s araucaria tree, which is highly dominant.
The Continent and associated islands are separated from the rest of the world by an endless tempest, uncrossable by humans.
Despite being very different from our current day Antarctica, due to climate change and likely a good bit of magic, and possible even alien technologies, one factor remains the same: the extreme polar day/night cycle. In almost all areas, “day” and “summer” are equivalent, while “night” and “winter” are as well, giving a cycle of roughly 5+ months of day, 5+ months of night, and a period of a few weeks of transition during the equinoxes. This has, as you might expect, affected human society quite a bit! In the recent past, before an imperial upset, societies all over tended to respond in major ways to the shift, with some of the possibilities being:
physically relocating en masse to new areas
switching from an egalitarian society to a strictly hierarchical one, or vice versa
otherwise completely adjusting societal structures, such as from matriarchal to patriarchal
speaking in a completely different register of their language, with differing grammar and vocabulary
Technology-wise it is still very much a work in progress, but I will be leaning on and enhancing a blended Paleolithic-meets-the Copper Age-meets-Medieval/Renaissance vibe in the technology levels.
The Languages of Antarctica
Three human language families make up almost all of the currently-known human languages on the Continent, and they all make up a large linguistic area, sharing a few general features:
Ergativity is common, though split systems of various kinds are common as well
Noun class systems that are at least partially inspired by the daysummer/nightwinter cycle, as well as the various kinds of flora and fauna, with some languages having 10+ of these
Shared conceptual metaphors (both used in idioms, as well as to philosophically extend the meanings of the above noun classes)
Common compound word calques, often extended from the conceptual metaphor system
Most common word order: head-first, VSO, prepositions/locative nouns
Prefixing in the verb system most common, this varies a lot by region
Morphological evidentiality is ubiquitous
Daysummer vs Nightwinter evident in grammar and in lexicon
fancified more intense grammar for one phase, colloquial lax vulgar grammar for other phase (which phase is which varies based on language and regional culture)
That's all for now! In the next few posts, I'll start sharing things about specific Antarctic languages!
(And I'll also be making some Conlang Year Updates as well, where I share about the feature that aligns with the current Conlang Year day!)
