Asari headcanon series: Language [part 1: general information]
I felt this insanely strong urge to make a headcanon post about asari languages. Here we go. @shepcdr I know you are the biggest alien language nerd so I will tag you.
I'm giving all of my key points titles to keep things organized.
Language diversity among the asari
For starters, I'd like to mention that there is no such thing as "the asari language". I don't think the asari would have one unified language. They are a wise species, they have a population of billions, no doubt did they have myriads of languages before they invented translators, and no doubt would a species as wise and intelligent, as embracing of diversity in life, appreciate the various ways you can express yourself through different languages. Asari are the last species I would expect to force a unified language on people, causing a generational loss of languages. I think throughout history, asari have done more to maintain the perseverance of languages rather than the loss.
To get an idea of how many languages the asari might have, I looked at Earth statistics. It is said that Earth has about 7000ish living languages, with a total number of approximately 30.000 languages having existed in human history.
The asari have a population of 5.5 billion, rather than 8 billion like 21st century humans, but they also possess mind-melding abilities that would make sharing languages easier, so I'm bold enough to claim that that over 10.000 languages are spoken on Thessia despite there being fewer asari than humans. And that's just limited to Thessia. I will get into more detail later.
The thousands of languages, just like human languages, would vary in phonology, structure and grammar to an incredible degree, which is why there is no clear answer to "what do asari languages sound like", just like you can't give a clear answer to the question what the human languages sound like.
The vocabulary is influenced by the environment in which the language evolved, languages native to communities found in coastal areas possess more words to describe tides, sand or water, those who evolved in snowier regions might have more words for different kinds of snow.
Endangered languages specialists
Thinking of how many languages were lost throughout human history made me ponder how many languages asari once had. And that made me come up with the idea that while asari probably lost many languages, they used their mind-melding abilities to keep their languages from going extinct.
Over time, that evolved to asari linguists specializing in the art, training their mind-melding abilities specifically for language acquisition. In the game, we can see that language acquisition is possible through the mind-meld, as Shepard is able to understand the Prothean language. Large amounts of information can be transferred from the mind of one individual to the mind of an asari.
Asari linguistics specialized in language acquisition via melding will seek out members and communities speaking endangered languages, form bonds with members and learn their languages through various sessions of mind-melds. Obviously, this is a demanding job requiring great sensitivity, charisma, empathy and patience, as the recipient of the meld should be ready and feel comfortable and interested in sharing their language and culture. By learning the endangered language, the asari can use her specialized knowledge of linguistics to analyze the language and record its features in the Codex of Galactic Languages.
There is no doubt that some romantic relationships have formed through these agreements, with asari children being born and growing up as native speakers of the endangered languages.. Sometimes it's a topic found in novels. An asari growing up in a small isolated alien community due to her mother having been a scientist researching the language.
Mind-melding to learn a language
Mind melding is said to be mentally exhausting for an asari if large amounts of knowledge are transferred. Liara feels light-headed after melding with Shepard in Mass Effect 1.
Asari do not learn a whole language in a single melding session, rather, it takes a series of sessions. Asari who are more experienced with melding have an easier time with it, those specialized in language acquisition via melding even more so.
The melding process does not grant the asari spoken fluency. The asari gains passive language skills, she is able to understand the language, but for as long as she has not practiced speaking the language to a sufficient degree, she won't be able to speak it anywhere near fluently. Their speaking abilities are comparable to human children who have responded to their parents in another language their whole life or for most of their life (this is very much a real thing, passive bilingualism). They struggle to retrieve words, build sentences, and use proper grammar, overall possessing little to no conversational skills despite understanding the language at a high level.
Fluency can be gained relatively quickly once a high level of understanding has been reached, within months of being intensely surrounded with the language every day conversational fluency is usually reached, since there is a sort of a subconscious baseline understanding of how the language works that sets the framework.
Asari multilingualism
Despite the existence of universal translators, the asari are a species who highly embrace multilingualism and recognize its benefits. The universal translators are never used to translate all languages into a single language, rather they enable the asari to learn all the languages of the people involved in raising her.
Many asari grow up multilingual. Asari have been known to grow up to understand or even speak the languages of various species natively: krogan, turians, drell, quarians, batarians, salarians, humans (humans have been around for a little less than 30 years, meaning some of the earliest born children to human-asari couples are now adolescents), volus, vorcha.
Obviously there is some limit to what sounds an asari can make due to their physiology, asari who find they cannot replicate the sounds will typically remain passive users of the languages, whereas those who possess the anatomy to produce the sounds either speak with accents due to some minor physical limitations remaining or are capable of speaking the language exactly like their alien parent. Since phonetics vary greatly between languages, it is very possible that, for example, one krogan language could be perfectly pronounced by an asari, but another may not.
An example of a multilingual asari upbringing:
An asari grows up on Omega in a community consisting mainly of other asari and batarians. Her father is a salarian. Through her salarian father, the asari learns to speak the salarian language Girmu. She is close to the mother's ex-partner, a batarian, and his two sons. During her formative years, she interacts with them enough to at learn their language Armeldan, which is also spoken by many other batarians in the community. She also speaks her mother's language Ioleta. Her translator is set to translate different languages not native to her (not spoken by her closest community/caretakers) into her native languages. Other batarian languages might be translated into Armeldan, other asari languages into Ioleta. Adjustments can be made to ensure an even distribution, for instance, if the asari finds her vocabulary limited due to only speaking Girmu with her father, other languages can be translated into Girmu for a broader exposure of vocabulary.
Translators, therefore, aid the asari in learning the multiple languages of her community, as well as allowing communication between the asari and those speaking languages foreign to her.
Dialects
In the past millennia, the asari have developed thousands of colonies in space, some of which are multispecies colonies. Asari growing up speaking alien languages natively, or acquiring them fluently as second languages have shaped the asari languages, creating new asari dialects influenced by alien languages.
Most asari languages come in a vast amount of different dialects due to these circumstances. Additionally, over time some changes have been so drastic that eventually a language split into different, new languages. Over time, various aspects have changed: Pronunciation, melody, grammar, idioms, vocabulary.
The way a single asari language is spoken on Omega differs from the way the same language is spoken on Thessia or on Illium. Furthermore, with the strong social class division and presence of gangs on Omega, there is an even stronger presence of regional accents and dialects on the station.