Fair Warning: this post is about 5 years old, so some of the information might be a bit dated. On the other hand, this post was last modified about 4.9 years ago, so maybe it's up-to-date after all. In any case, please keep all this in mind while reading. Thanks for understanding!
A Quick Diversion:  

The Actual News:

OK so here’s a bit more info I’ve worked out about the Galarian alphabet (aka Galar Alphabet, Galar Region Language, Galarian Language, etc)

First off, here are the characters, in no particular order. They are, however, split between what I guess are the “upper-case” characters and those which are “lower-case”. The “lower-case” characters, in turn, are also sized appropriately; I’ve overlaid one of those “kindergarten writing guidelines” in order to emphasize their relative size and placement.

Secondly, I did an initial count of character frequency of Galarian letters used in the game, and compared that to the character frequency of English letters. The charts of the initial results are below, and are in two forms:

Specifically, chart 1 sets the most used character as “100%”, and compares each other character’s frequency to it, while chart 2 simply adds up ALL characters counted and calculates the percentage the frequency that that character appears overall. Flatter graphs mean that each character appears more evenly relative to one another.

The results kinda supports the idea that Galarian is just gibberish, but it does also support the idea that there is some level of intention going on—what I called “consistent gibberish”. As seen in chart 1, the first few characters seem to mirror frequency similar to that of English, with the remaining characters appearing more often. Then in chart 2, the overall character frequency is far more flat than English… and even though Galarian has 39 characters over English’s 26 characters (50% more), the most frequently used Galarian character used more than 50% less than the most frequently used English character.

For the record, here is the results of my initial character frequency calculation for the Galarian alphabet:

The most infrequently used character, which resembles a lower-case “o”, is not a typo; I initially thought that maybe its appearance was either a cropped “tabbed-o” (the second most frequent character [24]) or the one that looks like a lower-case “u” (fifth most frequent [18])… but nope, it’s definitely an “o”.

Now it’s worth pointing out that the most frequent English characters which seemed to match the relative frequency of the first few Galarian characters are:

  1. E (12.02%)
  2. T (9.10%)
  3. A (8.12%)
  4. O (7.68%)
  5. I (7.31%)
  6. N (6.95%)

…which seems to match some of the relative frequencies of Galarian characters. Like, E is the most frequent English character, and the most frequent Galarian character is used as an “E” in a number of places. Likewise with A in English, and how the third-most frequent Galarian character was used as an “A” in “LEAGUE”, as seen in the “GALAR LEAGUE” example below:


Another interesting point is that many of the most frequently used Galarian characters are the “lower-case characters”. But I think this might be slightly skewed because I found them used more at the train station signs, and those tend to use those characters more exclusively. This was the reason I suspected that some characters might be used more frequently with one another than with others… which is why my next plan is to start recording actual examples of Galarian text, albeit in a more organized fashion, and then use that as a foundation to work out how often characters appear. Like, find all words with a particular Galarian character in it, and then count the frequency of other characters found within those words. I’m curious to see if it’s possible to find links between certain characters.

Here’s just a small example of what I’ve gathered so far… but I still have a ways to go. I’m also going to stick with words I find in-game, as opposed to any prerelease examples, as those clearly had some errors which would’ve been corrected by then.

Anyways, that’s all I’ve got to share at the moment. I’ve worked out quite a bit so far, but there’s a lot more left to uncover. This will definitely extend my playtime out by a bit more, but hey, that’s how I’ve rolled with this game since day one… I’ve always wanted to uncover something about this game I love that no one else thought to cover, or cover as extensively as I have.