So what lured me down this rabbit hole in the first place?
If you know anything about me, you’ll know that most of my thoughts either start or end with writing.
My most recent book, the Dealmaker’s Gambit, takes place in the world of Koleth– and that world is built largely on a foundation of constructed languages.
One of the main characters of that story, Zag, belongs to a supernatural group of people known as the Zader— at least, that’s what they’re called some of the time.
See, Dealmaker takes place primarily within the borders of the Remishi Alliance, a coalition of nations united by a common primary language. But there are other countries in this world. Kiha, another main character, is originally from Mata and natively speaks Abuian. Meanwhile another story I’m working on in this world begins in the nation of Zakilu, where the primary language is Situ.
People like Zag exist all over the world of Koleth, and have for as long as there have been people in those places– and so, each language has its own word to refer to them. For simplicity’s sake I avoided getting into the weeds of it all with Dealmaker with little trouble, but with this new project, I’m finding I can’t put it off much longer.
So what do I call people like Zag, and what does it mean if I do?
In Remishi, Zag would be a Zader, meaning gentry or nobility— it’s a term that calls back to the Remishi people being subjugated by powerful Zader (“those political assholes,” as Zag refers to them), who created a hierarchy that put themselves at the top, prompting a violent revolution that toppled the previous regime and put humans on top. And in light of that history, what once was a term of deference has become something very close to a slur.
Meanwhile the Situ people have a decidedly more neutral relationship with the same group of people. Their word for them is Shikna, meaning merchants, and their role is often to linger on the fringes of society and trade in magic to give the people what they want or need– but always for a price, and with little sympathy for quibbles like buyer’s remorse. Like many of our world’s traditions about faeries, genies, and witches, the Shikna are beings to be treated with caution and respect, and preferably with a lawyer present.
For the sake of simplicity, I put some serious thought into nixing Shikna as a term and using Zader instead, no matter the setting. Which got me thinking.
See, the Remishi Alliance is in many ways imperialistic. As much as they insist that they stay within their borders, they push their hegemony on the nations around them. And that eagerness to export their culture is baked into their interactions with the people who have to deal with them– their trade regulations which dominate the sea, their fashions which aren’t particularly practical in other regions, their systems of government, their philosophy and morality, even their calendar. And given all of that, there’s something downright insidious about using a slur to refer to a powerful and capricious being just because the term is popular a few countries over.
It’s fraught, and it’s fraught in a way that people in the real world deal with every day. I can’t even begin to cover the sheer breadth of the complexity of the issues at hand on my own– entire books have been written on the subjects by people far more qualified than me– but I’d like to at least be able to acknowledge that it’s a thing, and do so thoughtfully and with intention.
This is the last installment of a four-part series on choosing names and why they matter.
Part 1: A Person by Any Other Name
Part 2: Politics of Place
Part 3: A Take on Taxonomy
Part 4: Imaginary Worlds
JWTroemner.com 
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