Here's a concept that I have been thinking about for a while. What if a group of people spoke Dovahzul and created a new culture, not only using Dovahzul as leverage for a new culture, but (sparingly) creating new words to describe objects around them? My intrigue revolves mostly around how this group would end up and how the language would end up.

Well you can be sure that profanity would be among the first new words... 

Someone more familiar with all the words might have a better idea.

I think, honnlestly, that profanity might not even exist. Obviously, earlier words would exist based on environment, but I don't know if profanity would be first. I guess it depends on who is in the group, the culture itself, and how many objects around them don't have words in Dovahzul. But that's just my opinion. Thank you for the input. It's always nice to see what other people think.

I have been pondering this for a year, thanks for the topic.



The barest minimum requirement for natural language growth would be having people live for a long period of time in a community whose only common language is Dovahzul. So long in fact that canonical utterances get all but exhausted. That is a lot to ask in our world, since almost nobody speaks Dovahzul without knowing English first.



I also see another requirement: some people in the community who are less than fluent. This is because those who can't keep track of canon versus new material would promote the spreading of new inventions. In natural societies this is done by babies, but I doubt using babies for this purpose is in any way sensible.



If those factors were achieved and the community survived, language development would set forth. New lexical entries would generate - likely initially by compounding and contraction, later also through onomatopoeia or lexicalized mistakes. The people would still have to avoid outside contact, otherwise an established language might swallow the nascent system.



The end result wouldn't be true dragon language (dragons are too rare to afford for this test) but at least it would be a language dictated by necessity rather than the whims of conlangers.



I'm not suggesting we do this, but on the off chance, Russian-speaking Europe might be the best place to find non-anglophonic Skyrim players.

Interesting viewpoint. I haven't thought about it in some of those ways, and I definitely like that as a conlanger and an aspiring linguist.

Well, I only suggest that swears would be one of the first additions because while dragons may be content with using 'You're inadequate' for every situation, humans have quite a lot of other ways to put each other down lol

That is most definitely true. We humans have a need to insult one another.

Insulting one another is a way to show rivalry or even friendship, and those can sometimes be one in the same. So insulting is part of human culture.

Of course, but Dovahzul's lack of insults may influence a culture where insults are rare rather than push them to make more. Also, insults might be different, like how the slang word for testes in English is 'balls', but in Spanish, it is 'huevas'; 'eggs'.

I don't really think Dovahzul or a culture based around the language needs to have words specifically used as swears/profanity. From what we see in the game, the dovah place a great deal of importance on words and language, even outside use of the Thu'um. I think this would translate into seeing the use of profanity as lazy, and a lack of it in vocabulary wouldn't mean that the culture would be more polite or less inclined to use insults but rather have insults become something of an art. Why use an overused catch-all word when you can bend the language to craft an insult tailor-made to get under the recipient's skin? To do so would give yourself the chance to not only degrade the recipient, but also flaunt your own wit and mastery of words.

Definitely likely.