Grovish is the magical language of the Ambergrovians. This is a fictional alphabet/language that is, in its written form, a hybrid of Nordic Elder Futhark runes and Celtic ogham tree letters—with some additional revisions.
Ambergrove’s pantheon has associated Nordic runes, which are referenced in the Dragonwolf trilogy (the first books in the Tales of Ambergrove saga), particularly when Kip creates a bindrune for Mara and the Great Harbinger’s followers wear a bindrune of their own. However, as much of Ambergrove is also a nature-focused world, ogham and the meaning behind the tree language, used by nature beings and magical creatures, was embraced by many peoples as well. Wanting to create a universal language to allow all Ambergrovians to understand one another, the goddess of wisdom combined the two sacred written languages together to create one language. Some runes are repurposed to ensure the Earther standard alphabet (the Latin alphabet) is fully represented. Additional hashes are added to letters that did not have standard ogham lettering or representation.
Grovish is chiefly an alphabet. The magical nature of it allows it to be understood by anyone in Ambergrove, even if they came from Earth and learned a different language. English, Spanish, French, German, etc.—all languages that may be written in Earth’s most common alphabet may be transliterated to Grovish. The magic in the symbols makes it understandable by anyone who can read in whichever language they are able to read.
When spoken, Grovish sounds like whatever the person hearing it is best able to understand. If your native tongue is Spanish, it sounds like Spanish. If your native tongue is English, it sounds like English.
The books contain written speech that is presented in English rather than Grovish. This is because the standard language of the first publication is English. Those who know English would read it as English, not as Grovish. In Ambergrove, only native Ambergrovians who had never learned another language would see the Grovish characters. Something written in Grovish would appear in Grovish characters if the text was brought to Earth, as magic doesn’t work on Earth.
Writing in Grovish
The sentence structure broadly follows the elements of ogham. An open stave indicates the beginning of a sentence and a close stave indicates the end of a sentence. Neither runes or ogham have punctuation or standard numerals. As such, there are no numerals or special characters in this language. It is quite simply words with a marked beginning and end. Numbers would be spelled out.
Question marks are represented by close staves with an open circle above them. Exclamation points are represented by close staves with a filled circle above them. Spaces are presented as dashes to ensure word breaks are clear. The format loosely follows ogham written structure.
This means it would look like this in English:
And this in German:
Write in your preferred language. Grovish is a transliterative language. This means that instead of translating one language to another, the original language is simply written with Grovish symbols.
Write an open stave to start your sentence or phrase. Copy your sentence without any punctuation. If your chosen Earth language has other punctuation, such as accent symbols of any kind (such as é) or special characters (such as β or ¿), omit them or insert the Latin alphabet equivalent (é = e and β = ss). After each word, make a small dash to indicate you’re moving to the next word. At the end of the sentence, insert your close stave to match the intended ending punctuation. Staves and “spaces” can be resized however you prefer. Grovish is a handwritten language. If you prefer larger staves, enlarge them.
Sentences can carry over to additional lines. No additional symbols need to be inserted. Start a new sentence on the next line. The only additional characteristic is when someone writes in Grovish, when they finish writing the close stave, the whole sentence will flash green before looking just like normal writing. This is the magic in it activating.
Get the Grovish font for your computer!
After developing the Grovish language, I used an online tool called FontStruct to create Grovish as a TrueType file. This was my first time doing something like that, so there are certainly some hiccups. Unfortunately, the sizing and spacing are a little unintuitive (the letters have to be large to be legible and there’s a lingering dash at the end of each paragraph), but this accurately represents the language. If you are more experienced with font creation and TrueType files and would like to create a better version for your fellow adventurers, please contact the author through the website contact page.
Download the zipped folder below. Once downloaded, open the zipped folder and view all the included materials, including the explanatory file for typing in this font. When ready, open the TrueType file and select Install to add it to your computer’s list of fonts. Once installed, it will appear in the Gs in any standard program on your computer that has a font selector.
Tales of Ambergrove 