The world has two languages.

One is obviously the “universal English”, i.e. the everyday language can always be translated into English, so all NPCs and dialogues use this language.

The other one is the “ancient” language, which is unknown to the player in-universe as well as outside of the game. Tunic used their own custom alphabet for the entire UI, but it was simply a novel alphabet for english. This language (unnamed) is going to be a distinct language in general; this means unique alphabet, grammar, and vocabulary.

ancient language #

writing system #

The writing system is going to be inspired by two distinct alphabets (maybe three). These are

• The Shavian alphabet (𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯)
• The Korean alphabet (한글)

Note about Korean

An interesting part about the korean alphabet is the writing structure; rather than write linearly (each letter after the other), they use syllable blocks composed of letters, and then those are written linearly.
The example in Wikipedia for example shows that ‘Seoul’ is not written as

ㅅㅓㅇㅜㄹ

but as

서울

The final alphabet is then composed and used to transliterate the Greek alphabet¹

The script is then written using the syllabic setup of Korean

There will be no definitive way to figure out the language, until/unless a specific artifact is found, which will be the “Rosetta Stone”, allowing the transcription.