?wruLATIN ALFABET
Introduced in Pokémon Sword and Shield (“SwSh”) and used in at least Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (“ScVi”) and the upcoming Pokémon Legends Z-A, the “PokéLatin” Alphabet is a unique series of characters which is intended to represent the language used by the people in the Galar, Paldea and Kalos Regions, and can be found everywhere in the region: on various signs, storefronts, clothing, products, advertisement, random boxes… you name it, it’s on it. But what’s unique about PokéLatin is, although it clearly has plenty of similarities with existing characters from existing languages, it is wholly unlike any other language script seen in prior Pokemon series or even in real life.

Originally it was simply the “Galarian Alphabet” back during the original release of SwSh, but once it made it way into Paldea AND Kalos (at least as seen in Pokémon Legends Z-A), it became easier to just call it “PokéLatin”, reflecting the fact that the real world English, Spanish and French languages all use the Latin Alphabet. Bear in mind that this name is fan-made and has never been officially used by TPC/Nintendo… it’s just that there is no other term that’s better, unless you want to just say “Galarian/Paldean/Kalosian Alphabet”.

But what exactly is the PokéLatin Alphabet? Do the letters or words mean anything? Words tend to repeat, so surely they must mean something, right? Well, ever since the release of SwSh, I’ve already uncovered and deciphered a lot about it. And with the help of everyone at The Language Institute channel over at the PA! Discord, we’ve been able to unlock even more secrets. And yet despite all our work, there are still a lot MORE left to be uncovered and discovered. But here’s what we’ve been able to sort out so far:

 

 

Let’s get the basics out of the way:

I’m sure a lot of you are visiting this website for the first time and just want some straight-forward answers about it. So here they are:

  • The PokéLatin Alphabet has at least 41 unique characters: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789+?#!^
    • Want to download the font I made so you can write your own GPLA words on your own artwork? Click here!
    • With the release of Pokémon Legends Z-A, new letters (and potentially diacritics) have been added; we are still researching what they are and if maybe they’re simply different versions of the same characters.
  • Based on how these letters are used in various PokéLatin text, it appears these characters also seem to represent both “UPPER CASE” and “lower case” letters, which are:
    • UPPER CASE — ABCDEGJKLMQRSTVWXY34789+?#
    • lower case — FHINOPUZ01256!^
    • NOTE: these designations are unofficial, but there does seem to be a pattern.
  • PokéLatin is a unique script, which although appears to be based on existing letters from existing languages, they are generally completely new and unique… almost as if Game Freak intended for players to recognize them as some kind of human language, but one that celebrates all of humankind’s languages instead of just one.
    • Check out the “Character Inspirations” section below for more specific connections between GPLA characters and ones from other specific languages.
  • PokéLatin words do and don’t spell out actual existing words. And of the words they do spell, they don’t use the same characters many times. Putting it simply, PokéLatin is what I would call “consistent gibberish“.
    • This is a really difficult point to explain, because PokéLatin is very inconsistant in how it uses its letters. It’s almost as if Game Freak intentionally avoided making it understandable in order to prevent any potential claim that secret messages were being added into the game.
  • When PokéLatin words DO mean something, it tends to be proper names (characters, businesses, towns, etc) or Pokémon elemental types. These words are also rooted in Japanese romaji more often than not.
    • Names like Galar is GA9A4, Pokémon is ?wru#wt, Wedgehurst is M8EDDK, Milo is 94QQA7, Steel-type is WKDKJ8, and so forth… meaning that if you see those words in PokéLatin text anywhere, you can be certain it’s referencing them specifically.
    • Consider too that Milo’s Galarian name, 94QQA7, is based on his Japanese name YARROW. Same with the word for the Steel-type, WKDKJ8, which is based on the Japanese word for the type, HAGANE; note the two K letters for the romaji letter “A” in HAGANE.
    • Check out the Galarian Word List and Paldean Word List pages for examples of specific examples
  • However, most other times PokéLatin words are meaningless… random letters thrown together mostly to allow Game Freak background artists to throw in PokéLatin text for its look but with none of its meaning.
    • In document design, we consider this “lorem ipsum” text… specifically, we use dummy text which look like actual writing but is devoid of any meaning in order to fill in empty blanks to give us an idea of what something will look like before any actual text is added.
    • Well PokéLatin is full of similar text, almost as if Game Freak gave those artists a list of Galarian text for them to just copy and paste into their artwork. Since it’s not intended to be recognized—like it doesn’t involve a character’s name or Pokémon type—then apparently they art staff doesn’t care if it uses meaningless text.
    • I’m trying to piece together what this dummy text is, in order to use it to determine what text is actually dummy or legit.

  • Even more frustrating for deciphering text is that even when it’s clear that a PokéLatin word is supposed to be something, the characters used in one word don’t always apply to another.
    • For example, GV+E 4REVX is clearly “GAME FREAK”, while GA9A4 BEWCVE is obviously “GALAR LEAGUE”. The G/G’s and E/E’s are the same, but….
    • If we accept “GAME FREAK”, that might mean the second picture spells something like “G***F *E**AE”
    • But if we accept “GALAR LEAGUE”, that might mean the first picture spells out “GU*E R*EU*”
    • So many words fall into this problem.
  • This is why I call it “consistent gibberish“: even if the letters don’t match up—such as how 4 is used for both “F” and “R” and V is used for both “A” and “U”—we can still recognize that there is some level of consistency used, even if it’s used only on a per-word basis. It’s not used completely at random.
    • However, it is unclear WHAT that potential consistency might be, such as if the artists were given free reign and thus a certain artist preferred to use one set of connections while another artist preferred another, or if this decision was made by those higher up.
  • Another reason why I don’t believe letters are used PURELY at random is the fact that some letters are clearly intended to be “lower case” letters, versus the other “UPPER CASE” letters (as noted above).

The fact that the letters don’t seem to match up to any single sound or value has made many people give up on it. But I think they’re just quitters! there’s more to PokéLatin language than other people give it credit for.

Other facts which I’ve uncovered so far include:

  • For the record, PokéLatin has appeared in the following:
    • Galar Region in Pokémon Sword/Shield
    • Paldea Region in Pokémon Scarlet/Violet
    • On Professor Laventon chalkboard in Pokémon Legends Arceus
    • Kalos Region in Pokémon Legends Z-A
  • The letters themselves seem to be based on existing characters from various languages and scripts. After close analysis, the four scripts that seem to be represented the most are:
    1. Greek; or its descendants, like Cyrillic or Coptic
    2. Runic languages, like Futhark or Anglo-Saxon
    3. Japanese, mostly Katakana, sometimes Hiragana
    4. Korean hangul
    • Other characters are neither of these, and thus can come from Old English, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Georgian, etc. I plan on working on a guide which details the most likely inspiration for each character.
  • The shape of the characters are used consistently; some exceptions exist, however, but those are errors made by the artists or programmers more than unique elements of the language.
    • This covers if, say, a graphic element with Galarian letters on it was placed in reverse, or if a single character was drawn upside-down. I’ve also spotted a case where two “lower case” characters were placed one over the other to form a new characters, but I’m sure how intentional that was.
    • One exception to this is with the letter 0 , which I thought was a mis-drawn O. However, as I went through the game I started seeing more and more words with 0in it… they were few and far between, but they DID exist. So I decided to count 0 as its own character versus a variant or poorly drawn O.
  • Furthermore, the shape of the characters themselves don’t affect their apparent meaning.
    • For example, a post on 4chan/vp/ claimed that the character X has a different meaning because one X is thicker than another X which means it’s an “M” versus “S”.
    • Sorry Anon, but the only thing those different shapes represent is that it’s a different font or typeface used to type in Galarian (which is pretty dang neat IMHO).
  • Normal numbers (ie Arabic numerals) exist in Galar, so Route signs still use numbers 0 to 9.
  • Character frequency can also be used to determine some important facts about the Galarian language. For example:
    • If the Galarian letters were used completely randomly, the frequency of each character used would be basically equal.
    • Conversely, an alphabet used by a real language will use some letters significantly more than others (like how English uses E, O and T way more than Z, J, and Q).
    • But as it turns out, some letters are definitely used more than other letters. Specifically:
      • OE6AW are used the most (descending in that order)
      • PY40G?# are used the least (also in descending in that order)
      • The last four least used characters, 0, G, ? and #, are actually used SIGNIFICANTLY less then the other five. Like, the frequency of those first five characters decreases reasonably, only for the last four to bottom-out super fast. In fact, so far the character G only seems to be used when writing the word for “GALAR”, GA9A4, and not much else that I’ve seen.
    • Anyways, the fact that the Galarian character’s frequency of use is somewhere between “evenly used” (if it was random) and “some used significantly more than others” (if it was a true language) suggests that perhaps some of the element artists for SwSh had a specific intention to make the language look “recognizable”, while some artists simply didn’t give a crap and tossed together letters at random and then copied-and-pasted those letters in multiple places.
      • In fact, below is a perfect example of an example of an artist that was lazy and did the bare minimum to make it “look realistic”.

That’s literally the bullet-points versions of the Galar language and its alphabet. However, there’s still plenty to know! Check through my site archives to read some posts where I share some random thoughts about the script.

There is also a Galarian Word List page where I’ve written down every Galarian word I could find; in fact, I still haven’t reached the 4th Gym yet because I’ve been spending all my time with finding words! Anyways, the Galarian Word List also further discusses the idea that some words are intended to be specific words, such as how:

  • 1 ^OH = “1 car”
  • 2+ ^OHZ = “2+ cars”

The Word List will slowly determining if any particular word is pure “gibberish” or if it actually does have an intended meaning.

 

 

CHARACTER INSPIRATIONS:

One other fun part about sorting out the PokéLatin alphabet is seeing which languages and scripts any particular PokéLatin character comes from. Some of them are obvious, others less so, but I definitely would like to sort out what their inspirations were and share them with you.

Until I get some pictures up, I can at least share a few observations; the following are easily recognized, albeit in various rotations or are flipped:

  • There are obviously Latin characters in it, such as: Y = Y, M = M, V = V, X = X
  • The Old English character eth can be seen, albeit with its uppercase letter backwards: D = Ð, O = Ꝺ/ꝺ
  • Some appear to be Greek, such as: E = Ξ, B = Σ, + = Ψ
  • Cyrillic is used, particularly: L = Г, Y = Ч, W = Ф, R = Я, # = Л
  • Japanese katakana characters include: 9 = ラ, A = ム, 7 = ル
  • As do Korean hangul characters like: K = ㅅ, T = ㅔ, V = ㅈ, 9 = ㅋ
  • Quite a few ancient Germanic/Norse runic alphabet appear: B = ᛊ, C = ᚲ, R = ᚱ
  • And finally it looks like these Hebrew characters were worked in: P N G =  פ א ק

Of course it’s worth noting that these scripts share some characters between them—like Greek, Cyrillic and Latin alphabets all share similar characters—as well as how many of these comparison are similar albeit flipped or rotated. Fundamentally, however, it appears as if the whole goal of GPLA is to not be a completely new alphabet on its own, but to be a unique mix of all of the world’s major scripts, to further underline the universality and common ground we all share in our humanity.

Eventually I plan on making a handy little picture guide covering all the different inspirations for these characters, so keep an eye out for it here!

 

 

OK, that’s all I have for right now. I’ll share more of my research as soon as I work more stuff out.

Anyways, I’m a HUUUUUGE language nerd. Not so much in the actual speaking of them (tho not for lack of trying!) as much as in the actual development of new languages (ie conlangs, or constructed languages). Specifically, I’ve been making my own languages since high school, and in fact there’s one I’ve been working on one since even before PA! existed. So seeing that the Galar, Paldea and Kalos Region uses its own alphabet like this was a great crossover between my loves in life.