Wadrā, binant kerd Ufamereis, nāsqe Leudī, megalā draugāqe
— Glatēs
Wadgaris tells the linguistic story of a people that could have been, and their life in an area of central Europe that was once brimming with change.
Who were these people?
Unfortunately, we cannot say that these people were. Wadgaris is an imaginative story, woven collaboratively into an area of history that suits it. The people and their language are, technically, fictitious but the circumstances they are imagined within are very real, along with the words, sounds, residents and neighbours that shaped their language.
Learn more about this imagined central European trade culture and the rich tradition that formed within it as it flourished in northern Europe's early Iron Age:
Nkufrītā
What is the language?
Wadgaris literally means 'the wading-speech'. As the Oderian trade culture formed, various western Indo-European linguistic groups - primarily Celtic and Germanic, with some fringe eastern Balto-Slavic contact - bestowed the legacy of their particular speech to this infant culture.
In an environment where mutual intelligibility of these many languages was now only barely possible, a singular neutral tongue inevitably arose in this trading context, where ability to communicate naturally held great value. Over time and with continued contact, this middle-ground dialect stabilised into a language in its own right, a lingua franca or koiné, now living and growing as any other language might.
Nkufrītā Wārenkā
Extras
Here are some other interesting pages that you might want to check out, that haven't yet found their place in the structure of the site.