Pronunciation of the Dragon Language
For some time now, I have been working on a pet project to redesign the Dragon language in Skyrim (as some of you might know, Bethesda has done a very poor job of designing it). Since most of it is not established by lore, or even conflicting with it, I won’t post it here. However, I didn’t change anything about the pronunciation, so here it is.
(The characters between brackets are the IPA spelling of the sound)
- A [æ] as in ban
- AA [a:] as in bra (uncommon in English)
- AH [ɑ] as in father
- B [b] as in bad
- D [d] as in day
- E [ɛ] as in fell
- EL [ɛl] as in fell
- EY [ei] as in pay
- F [f] as in fail
- G [ɡ] as in good
- H [x] not present in English, pronounciation varies from Scottish-Gaelic loch (lake), to Dutch gaan (to go)
- I [ɪ] as in bin
- II [i] as in sea
- IR [ir] as in beer
- J [dʒ] as in jolt
- K [k] as in cool
- L [l] as in lame
- M [m] as in man
- N [n] as in night
- O [ɔ] as in dawn
- OO [oʊ] as in bone
- P [p] as in paw
- Q [k] as in cool
- R [ʀ] or [r] 1 [R] does not appear in English, but is known as a rolling R (more akin to the Northern-Netherlandish R than the Scottish R), [r] as in beer
- S [s] as in snake
- T [t] as in trait
- U [u:] as in do
- UR [ʏr] not present in English, most akin to hurt
- UU ?2
- V [v] as in view
- W [w] as in swine
- X [ks] as in Alexander
- Y [j] as in yes
- Z [z] as in zoo
- (TH) [ð] or [θ] 3 4 either as in father, or as in math
- (’) [ʔ] 3 as the stop in uh-oh
- ↩
when R appears at the start or the middle of a word, it is generally pronounced as [R]. At the end of the word, it is pronounced as [r]
- ↩
while there is a individual letter for UU in the Dragon script, it has not appeared in any spoken form as of yet
- ↩
While there are no individual letters for TH and ' in the Dragon script, they do appear in some words, for example: Thu’um (in which TH is treated as a distinct group, instead of individual sounds)
- ↩
For the variation of pronunciation, the same rules apply as in English.