The Language of Alchemia Story

The world of Alchemia Story has a number of signs around the game world with writing on them, though it's not in any recognizable language... or at least alphabet. On this page I'm going to work through from basic principles to see what, if anything, it's possible to identify about the language in question.

Initially, there are basically four possibilities: One, it's random, meaningless gibberish. Two, it's a phonetic language, like English or most Romance languages, just encoded into a novel character set. Three, it's a syllabic language, like Japanese, encoded into a novel character set. Four, it's a constructed language the developers or designers made up.

Note that there are potentially ways to differentiate between one and four, given a large enough corpus of writing. It's not clear that the game contains sufficient text to do so, but it's a possibility.

This seems daunting, but it's not. For one, we can almost immediately rule out a phonetic language, because of a pair of signs in the casino town:

I don't know what these say, but that's sort of immaterial at this point. What's important is the pattern. There are two characters, here. One sign is "ABA"; the other is either "AB" or "BA", depending on whether they're read from right-to-left or the other way 'round. And that's just too short to make any sort of sense, in a phonetic language.

But it does potentially make sense, in a syllabic language, such as Japanese. Consider such AB, ABA combinations as neko and koneko, for instance. I don't think these buildings are animal shelters, lol, but it's a start. We still haven't ruled out a conlang, of course... or gibberish. But given that the developers are Japanese, it seems not impossible that they've transliterated, encoded, Japanese into an alphaet of their invention. If this is true, then they've probably also kept the right-to-left order, as well. Is there evidence for that?

Maybe.

These are signs from the first part of the July-August 2019 summer beach event. These are bins for trash people collect, and some patterns immediately jump out. Two begin (right-to-left...) with the same character, and three end with the same character; two of the latter end with the same two characters in the same order. That is probably not a coincidence.

Now, I don't speak (or read) Japanese, and my interest in this is purely a combination of linguistic and cryptanalytic. But it's hard not to note that, outside of language matters, the Japanese are accustomed to sorting garbage into four separate types. Even if there are no PET bottles in Alchemia Story, this may be a local cultural norm that's slipped in because of its pervasiveness.

But wait! From the Enhancement Center onsen map, an interesting case study. It's hard to escape the conclusion it's written top-to-bottom. Also, there are eight characters, but three of them are the same.

From the same map, another, larger sign; this has (as far as I know) the most text of any sign in the game. What's also noteworthy is that it's clearly connected to the vertical sign, above. In fact, this sign contains the exact same two four-character strings as the sign aove... if you read it left-to-right.

So if the language reads left-to-right, this means three of the garbage labels start with the same character, and two end with the same.

Or it's gibberish, and the graphic designers were being lazy.

But reinforcing the idea that this could be transliterated Japanese is the fact that, if we accept the theory that this is a syllaic language, as seems probable, there are some eight-syllable and even one eleven-syllable lines here, with no hint of any kind of word separation. Again, this could just be a mix of laziness and pervasive cultural norms, but the overall number of distinct glyphs here is high enough that I'm skeptical about the laziness hypothesis.

A sign from the August 2019 event.

So, if you read Japanese and think you can help decipher this language, hit me up in-game. A good starting point might be the M-like character that ends two of the garbage labels, and appears repeatedly in the onsen signage; it seems to be the most common character in the in-game signage, and doesn't show any patterns regarding pairing with a preceding or successive character/syllable.

Update, November 2019:

A few days after I posted this, someone sent me a link to the following graphic, which apparently comes from a Japanese Alchemia Story group on Facebook. Evidently, someone over there did the same thing I did above, and worked out all (most?) of the language. Whoo.

Go back to the main page, maybe?