Hilichurlian

See also: Languages

Hilichurlian
Type	Languages Lore

Hilichurlian is one of the main languages of Teyvat spoken and is spoken predominantly by hilichurls.

Overview

Hilichurlian is the language spoken by hilichurls. It is unknown if hilichurls have a writing system for their language.

Hilichurlian isn't well understood in Teyvat as few people are interested in hilichurls; According to Ella Musk, Hilichurlian Linguistics is an underdeveloped academic field. Due to the risk of humans interacting with hilichurls, its study is limited by the researcher's ability to complete field work. Due to this, the study of Hilichurlian Linguistics is predominantly driven by Ella Musk's ongoing research and that of her ancestor — most likely her grandfather — Jacob Musk. Jacob Musk was described as the "Poet Laureate" of Hilichurlian for his book, Hilichurl Ballad Selection, an accolade he was not fond of. Ella Musk introduces her self as a professor of Hilichurlian Linguistics specializing in "applied grammar for vernacular Hilichurlian."

Materials on the language of the hilichurls are scarce and most are written by the same small group of scholars — Jacob Musk and Ella Musk. Additionally, as both were based in Mondstadt, much of their research has been only on the hilichurl tribes local to the region. Their attempts to understand Hilichulian language and customs has had mixed results. Ella Musk admits that without more field work, she is uncertain of the meaning behind several words. During Ella Musk's commissions, the Traveler attempts to speak Hilichurlian with varying degrees of success depending on the player's choices. If the player selects the correct words, the hilichurls respond with dancing. If an incorrect word is selected, they grow aggressive leading immediately to a fight. Before Mika joined the Knights of Favonius as a cartographer, he went with Ella Musk on one of her "language exchange" trips to get some expedition practice. While conversing with a hilichurl, Ella Musk made a mistake which ended in both of them getting beat up.

Kaeya and Venti have been observed to hold some level of proficiency in Hilichulian, but it is unknown how or when they studied the language. Venti claims to have learned it to help with his songwriting, but states he hasn't actually written any ballads in Hilichurlian. The Traveler also exercises their Hilichurlian during Lionfang's Legacy, the third part of Venti's Story Quest Carmen Dei Chapter: Act I - Should You Be Trapped in a Windless Land.

Hilichurls "across the continent" have been observed singing.

Abyss mages can speak Hilichurlian.

Translation

Real world attempts to decipher the language of the Hilichurls have been made using a combination of sources including the official manga, books such as Hilichurl Ballad Selection, Hilichurl Cultural Customs, and Ella Musk's commissions. Hilichurlian is the most understood distinct language of Teyvat. Unlike most other languages in Teyvat, which are real life languages such as English and Latin written with a custom alphabet, Hilichurlian is a constructed language and is therefore linguistically distinct, with distinct phonology, words, phrases, and grammar.

A key part of understanding the language comes from the second episode of the official Chinese livestream "Mondstadt Tea Party," which gives two translated phrases: Mosi mita and Mosi gusha, which literally mean "eat meat" and "eat vegetables" respectively, and are used figuratively as expressions of happiness and sadness, respectively.

A major source of information on Hilichurlian is the Handy Handbook of Hilichurlian (HHH), written by Ella Musk's grandfather. The HHH can be treated as generally correct as the Traveler will not run into issues when using the HHH as a guide. However, it may have dubious accuracy when it comes to the exact nuances of Hilichurlian due to Ella's own errors in the language as well as any errors in understanding that the original author had.

Lexicon

Main article: Hilichurlian/Lexicon

A list of known common words of Hilichurlian. Please pay attention to the references.

Hilichurlian	English	CN player Analysis	Notes
mosi	to eat
mita	meat		Has positive connotations.
gusha	vegetables		Has negative connotations. The color of gusha is green.
mi (plural: mimi)		I, me (plural: we, us)
muhe	like, want	triumph
biat		to hit, to curse	May be used for emphasis (e.g., "very").
ye (plural: yeye)		you, your (register unknown, possibly condescending or informal)	May be similar to Japanese お前 or Korean 너 where it does not express pure condescension, but can imply closeness to the addressee. However, it still connotes condescension by implying that the addressee is of a lower social standing and socially impermissible usages of the pronoun should be understood as a sign of contempt.
yo (plural: yoyo)		you, your (register unknown, friendly or formal)
da/dada	good/very good, affirmation, very (emphasis)		Can be used as praise
domu		to dance
eleka		now	Meaning uncertain
sada	solid, hard	to sing, singing, song	The phrase upa sada means that you are prepared to do something.
nye		not, un-	Can be used for negation
nunu	to sleep		The color of nunu is black. This may refer to nighttime.
nini		storm, wind, Anemo	Meaning uncertain. The color of nini is white. Conveys the concept of ephemerality, or to disappear (as a verb)
zido		here, this	May also mean "nothing" in some contexts. May also mean "to mark", "to go" or be used to otherwise indicate a specific thing. Possibly deictic.
movo		to move, to bring, to come	Meaning uncertain. Movo lata is water. (Since "lata" may mean cold or ice, "movo lata" literally means "moving ice", indicating water)
kuzi		mighty, strong
celi	heat; Pyro, fire; the sun (typically celi upa)		The color of celi is red. The phrase celi lata (literally "hot cold" or possibly "fire cold") refers to things that emit light, but not heat, such as Small Lamp Grass, fireflies, stars, and the moon.
upa		to combine, to merge, to gather	Meaning uncertain, but upa possily meant something far ahead and cannot be grasped. In some context, upa indicates the spirit. Dada upa means "very tall/large mountain." Celi upa means "the sun." Upa sada means that you are prepared to do something.
shato		like, alike, similar
lata	Cryo, ice, cold		The color of lata is blue. Movo lata is water.
unu	one	god	A holy word that embodies hilichurls' concept of gods and the origin of life. The color of unu is yellow.
du	two
unu du	three		Literally "one two."
dudu	four		Literally "two-two."
ya (plural: yaya)		human	Can also mean "person" or "people"
ika	enemy, bad people	enemy
kundala		to kill, to fight	May also mean "enemy" as a noun
dala		what?
si		thing
valo		thank you
buka		stomach	May possibly indicate hunger.
guru-guru		hungry
kucha	small	weak	Kucha gusha (lit. "small grass") means seed. Slightly contemptuous connotation.
odomu		friend	Meaning currently under review.
tiga		stone, Geo
plata		shield
vin		wine
pupu		grass	Meaning uncertain, may be used insultingly
beru si		what are you doing?	Meaning of individual words uncertain
beru nye / beru nya	stop talking or be quiet
mani	hands, physical labor; five	to give	The meaning of "five" possibly comes from the number of fingers on a hand.
olah	hello
tomo	unique, unusual; help;	ally	Mentioned many times in the Mutual Exchange and Hilichurl Justice quests in the Mimi Tomo event. No direct translation given. Meaning currently under review.
aba	before		Used by Ella Musk in Language Exchange, and by hilichurl in Poetry Exchange. Possibly means "before." Possibly means "want."
ka	unknown		Used by Ella Musk in Language Exchange.
todo	unknown		Used by Hilichurl in Language Exchange. May mean "give."
biadam	bad		Exact meaning unknown, always strong negative. May be rude.
boya	color		Used as a suffix for colors. Celi boya (lit. "fire color") is red, gusha boya (lit. "grass color") is green, lata boya (lit. "ice color") is blue, nini boya is white, nunu boya (lit. "sleep color") and sama boya are black, and unu boya (lit. "God's color/one color") is yellow.
mito	know
lawa	king or chief		As in Lawachurl.
sama	unknown		As in Samachurl. The color of sama is black.
hili	unknown		As in Hilichurl.
in	in		Meaning uncertain.
unta	unknown		Mentioned in Handy Handbook of Hilichurlian. Possibly means "after."
Du ya zido dala?	Where did this thing go?		Mentioned in Handy Handbook of Hilichurlian. Meaning of du uncertain. Inconsistent with other translations. Possibly idiomatic.

Phonology

Hilichurlian vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i Media:Close_front_unrounded_vowel.ogg		ɯ Media:Close_back_unrounded_vowel.ogg
Mid	ɛ Media:Open-mid_front_unrounded_vowel.ogg	ə* Media:Mid-central_vowel.ogg	ʌ Media:PR-open-mid_back_unrounded_vowel2.ogg
Open	æ Media:Near-open_front_unrounded_vowel.ogg

Allophonic vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Mid			ɔ Media:PR-open-mid_back_rounded_vowel.ogg
Open	a Media:PR-open_front_unrounded_vowel.ogg

Full monophthongs

Hilichurlian	Vowel	Allophone
ika	æ	a
celi	ɛ
mani	i
movo	ə	ʌ
movo	ʌ	ɔ
gusha	ɯ

Consonants

Tenuis		Aspriate		Voiced		Nasal		Approximant
/p/	Allophone of /b/	/pʰ/	plata	/b/	buka	/m/	mita
/t/	Allophone of /d/	/tʰ/	tiga	/d/	dala	/n/	nini	/l/	lata
								/ɹ̠/, /r/	beru
/k/	Allophone of /g/	/kʰ/	kundala	/ɡ/	guru-guru	/ŋ/	Allophone of /n/	/w/	lawa
		/t͡ʃʰ/	kucha
				/β/	vin
/s/	sada			/z/	zido
/ʃ/	shato							/j/	ya
/h/	homu

Hilichurlian is observed to have high allophonic variation. Some speakers may pronounce the graphemes ⟨a⟩ and ⟨e⟩ as both /æ/. Voiced consonants may sometimes be pronounced with tenuis consonants instead.

The mid central vowel, /ə/, although present in Hilichurlian, is not very common. It only appears as the rendition of the grapheme ⟨o⟩ in special cases. ⟨o⟩ is normally pronounced as /ʌ/. For example, the word movo is pronounced with /ə/ in the first ⟨o⟩ and the regular reading of /ʌ/ in the second ⟨o⟩.

Official Transcription	Voice-Over
Odomu Movo!

Hilichurlian does not appear to have diphthongs. In words where vowels are adjacent to each other, such as biadam, hiatus is employed instead and ⟨bi⟩ and ⟨a⟩ are considered separate morae.

Official Transcription	Voice-Over
Biadam!

Morphosyntactic Alignment

Hilichurlian is generally an ergative-absolutive language, however it does not purely abide by the rules of ergative-absolutive morphosyntactic alignment.

One main example is the interrogative mood of a transitive verb; in a classical ergative-absolutive language, the agent of a transitive verb is always the ergative, and never the absolutive. However, in Hilichurlian, when a transitive verb takes the interrogative dala as the object, the agent must be marked in absolutive case. For example, ye muhe dala? instead of yo muhe dala?

The following table lists ergative-absolutive pairs.

Pronoun	Ergative	Absolutive
First-person	mi	mi
First-person plural	mimi	mimi
Second-person	yo	ye
Second-person plural	yoyo	yeye

Orthography

Hilichurlian is written with the Latin alphabet, however it is unclear if the Hilichurls write Hilichurlian themselves or if the orthography was simply developed by humans such as Jacob Musk to transcribe the sounds of Hilichurlian.

Hilichurlian is observed to not use the letters f, j, q, and x. Therefore, the Hilichurlian alphabet contains 22 letters: 5 vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and 17 consonants.

• A a
• B b
• C c
• D d
• E e
• G g
• H h
• I i
• K k
• L l
• M m
• N n
• O o
• P p
• R r
• S s
• T t
• U u
• V v
• W w
• Y y
• Z z

Pluralization

In Hilichurlian, nouns and pronouns are abstractly pluralized through reduplication. The first-person singular pronoun mi is reduplicated to become the first-person plural pronoun mimi.

Verbs

In Hilichurlian, verbs are not inflectionally distinguished from nouns or adjectives. A verb as a headword can be used as a noun and adjective too in some cases. They do not inflect or conjugate, but have some main constructions.

Hilichurlian is a subject-verb-object (SVO) language, like English and Chinese. The direct object is placed directly after the verb, and the subject precedes the verb.

Hilichurlian does not have definite or indefinite articles, much like Chinese or Japanese.

SUBJECT	VERB	OBJECT
Mi	muhe	ye.
I-erg	like or win (over)	you-abs.

SUBJECT	VERB	OBJECT
Yoyo	zido	ika.
You (plural)-erg	fight or kill	(the) enemy-abs.

SUBJECT	VERB	OBJECT
Ye	muhe	dala?
You-abs	want or like	what?-abs
What do you want/like?

However, the locative case is marked by placing the location prior to an intransitive movement verb.

qualifier	SUBJECT	locative	VERB
Kuzi	Unu	ya	zido.
Mighty	Unu-erg [a god]	(the) human-abs-loc	goes (to)
The mighty Unu goes to the human.

Hilichurlian has 9 grammatical moods in a total of 2 grammatical mood categories:

• Realis (real)
  1. Declarative (decl). This mood is used to declare that something is the case.
  2. Negative (neg). This mood is used to encode negative (non-affirmative) polarity into an utterance.
  3. Immediate (imm). This mood is used to signify that a verb is being performed in the immediate present.
  4. Emphatic (emp). This mood is used to stress and emphasize a verb.
• Irrealis (irr)
  • Deotonic (deo)
    1. Imperative (imp). This mood is used to directly issue commands to a second party listener.
    2. Optative (opt). This mood is used to indicate a wish or hope to either the speaker themselves or a second party.
    3. Desiderative (desi). This mood is used to indicate a speaker's desire.
    4. Jussive (jus). This mood is used to issue commands to a third party.
  • Epistemic (epi)
    1. Interrogative (int). This mood is used to obtain information from a second party listener.

Conjugation of muhe (to win, to like, to want) transitive
	Realis					Irrealis
	Declarative	Negative	Immediate	Emphatic	Emphatic negative	Imperative	Optative	Desiderative	Jussive	Interrogative
First person (singular)	Mi muhe	Mi muhe nye	Eleka mi muhe	Mi muhe mita	Mi muhe mita nye	-	-	Mi muhe muhe	-	Mi muhe dala
First person (plural)	Mimi muhe	Mimi muhe nye	Eleka mimi muhe	Mimi muhe mita	Mimi muhe mita nye	-	-	Mimi muhe muhe	-	Mimi muhe dala
Second person (singular)	Yo muhe	Yo muhe nye	Eleka yo muhe	Yo muhe mita	Yo muhe mita nye	Muhe	Yo muhe	Yo muhe muhe	-	Ye muhe dala*
Second person (plural)	Yoyo muhe	Yoyo muhe nye	Eleka yoyo muhe	Yoyo muhe mita	Yoyo muhe mita nye	Muhe	Yoyo muhe	Yoyo muhe muhe	-	Yeye muhe dala*
Third person	Muhe	Muhe nye	Eleka muhe	Muhe mita	Muhe mita nye	-	Muhe	Muhe muhe	Muhe	Muhe dala

Conjugation of kundala (to steal, to rob) transitive
	Realis					Irrealis
	Declarative	Negative	Immediate	Emphatic	Emphatic negative	Imperative	Optative	Desiderative	Jussive	Interrogative
First person (singular)	Mi kundala	Mi kundala nye	Eleka mi kundala	Mi kundala mita	Mi kundala mita nye	-	-	Mi muhe kundala	-	Mi kundala dala
First person (plural)	Mimi kundala	Mimi kundala nye	Eleka mimi kundala	Mimi kundala mita	Mimi kundala mita nye	-	-	Mimi muhe kundala	-	Mimi kundala dala
Second person (singular)	Yo kundala	Yo kundala nye	Eleka yo kundala	Yo kundala mita	Yo kundala mita nye	Kundala	Yo kundala	Yo muhe kundala	-	Ye kundala dala*
Second person (plural)	Yoyo kundala	Yoyo kundala nye	Eleka yoyo kundala	Yoyo kundala mita	Yoyo kundala mita nye	Kundala	Yoyo kundala	Yoyo muhe kundala	-	Yeye kundala dala*
Third person	Kundala	Kundala nye	Eleka kundala	Kundala mita	Kundala mita nye	-	Kundala	Muhe kundala	Kundala	Kundala dala

Conjugation of upa (to go beyond) transitive
	Realis					Irrealis
	Declarative	Negative	Immediate	Emphatic	Emphatic negative	Imperative	Optative	Desiderative	Jussive	Interrogative
First person (singular)	Mi upa	Mi upa nye	Eleka mi upa	Mi upa mita	Mi upa mita nye	-	-	Mi muhe upa	-	Mi upa dala
First person (plural)	Mimi upa	Mimi upa nye	Eleka mimi upa	Mimi upa mita	Mimi upa mita nye	-	-	Mimi muhe upa	-	Mimi upa dala
Second person (singular)	Yo upa	Yo upa nye	Eleka yo upa	Yo upa mita	Yo upa mita nye	Upa	Yo upa	Yo muhe upa	-	Ye upa dala*
Second person (plural)	Yoyo upa	Yoyo upa nye	Eleka yoyo upa	Yoyo upa mita	Yoyo upa mita nye	Upa	Yoyo upa	Yoyo muhe upa	-	Yeye upa dala*
Third person	Upa	Upa nye	Eleka upa	Upa mita	Upa mita nye	-	Upa	Muhe upa	Upa	Upa dala

Trivia

• Based on the proposed translations, Ella Musk sometimes says something completely different from what she intends to, especially in dialogue lines available since before the event Mimi Tomo.
• Some of the translations of Hilichurlian were based on the Chinese equivalents provided during an official voice actor livestream.

Olah!

Mosi mita!

Mosi gusha!

• In the official voice actor livestream, Jean's voice actor says that their information comes from Ella Musk, who also approves of their plans to give Hilichurlian lessons. It's unlikely that this interaction is canon since Jean's voice actor says this as herself, the voice actor in real life. However, it is still noteworthy that the information is presented as information from Ella Musk rather than from anyone in real life who worked on Hilichurlian.
• Non-Hilichurl characters who are known to, claim to, or are implied to know at least some Hilichurlian:
  • Jacob Musk, the author of the current major reference materials on Hilichurls and Hilichurlian, including Hilichurl Ballad Selection and Hilichurl Cultural Customs
  • Ella Musk
  • Venti
  • Kaeya

Other Languages

Language	Official Name	Literal Meaning
English	Hilichurlian	—
Chinese (Simplified)	丘丘语 Qiūqiū-yǔ
Chinese (Traditional)	丘丘語 Qiūqiū-yǔ
Japanese	ヒルチャール語 Hiruchaaru-go
Korean	츄츄어어語 Chyuchyu-eo	Hilichurlian
Spanish	Hilichurlio	Hilichurlian
French	Brutocollinus	Hilichurlian
Russian	Хиличурлский язык Khilichurlskiy yazyk	Hilichurl Language
Thai	ภาษา Hilichurl Phasa Hilichurl
Vietnamese	Tiếng Hilichurl
German	Hilichurlisch	Hilichurlian
Indonesian	Bahasa Hilichurl	Hilichurl Language
Portuguese	Hilichurlês
Turkish	Dağ Yabanisi Dili	HilichurlHilichurlHilichurlHilichurl Tooltip for HilichurlHilichurlⓘlit. "mountain savage" Language