The people of the Archipelago speak Hardic. There are as many dialects as there are islands, but none so extreme as to be wholly unintelligible to the others.
Osskili, spoken in Osskil and two islands northwest of it, has more affinities to Kargish than to Hardic. Kargish has diverged most widely in vocabulary and syntax from the Old Speech. Most of its speakers (like most Hardic speakers) do not realise that their languages have a common ancestry. Archipelagan scholars are aware of it, but most Kargs would deny it, since they have confused Hardic with the Old Speech, in which spells are cast, and thus fear and despise all Archipelagan speech as malevolent sorcery.
WRITING
Writing is said to have been invented by the Rune Masters, the first great wizards of the Archipelago, perhaps to aid in retaining the Old Speech. The dragons have no writing.
There are two entirely different kinds of writing in Earthsea: the True Runes and runic writing.
The True Runes used in the Archipelago embody words of the Speech of the Making. True Runes are not symbols only, but reifactors: they can be used to bring a thing or condition into being or bring about an event. To write such a rune is to act. The power of the action varies with the circumstances. Most of the True Runes are found only in ancient texts and lore-books, and used only by wizards trained in their use; but a good many of them, such as the symbol written on the door lintel to protect a house from fire, are in common use, familiar to unlearned people.
Long after the invention of the True Runes, a related but nonmagical runic writing was developed for the Hardic language. This writing does not affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably.
It is said that Segoy first wrote the True Runes in fire on the wind, so that they are coeval with the Language of the Making. But this may not be so, since the dragons do not use them, and if they recognise them, do not admit it.
Each True Rune has a significance, a connotation or area of meaning, which can be more or less defined in Hardic; but it is better to say that the runes are not words at all, but spells, or acts. Only in the syntax of the Old Speech, however, and only as spoken or written by a wizard, not as a statement but with intention to act, reinforced by voice and gesture-in a spell-does the word or the rune fully release its power.
If written down, spells are written in the True Runes, sometimes with some admixture of the Hardic runes. To write in the True Runes, as to speak the Old Speech, is to guarantee the truth of what one says-if one is human. Human beings cannot lie in that language. Dragons can; or so the dragons say; and if they are lying, does that not prove that what they say is true?
The spoken name of a True Rune may be the word it signifies in the Old Speech, or it may be one of the connotations of the rune translated into Hardic. The names of commonly used runes such as Pirr (used to protect from fire, wind, and madness), Sifl (“speed well”), Simn (“work well”) are used without ceremony by ordinary people speaking Hardic; but practitioners of magic speak even such well-known, often used names with caution, since they are in fact words in the Old Speech, and may influence events in unintended or unexpected ways.
The so-called Six Hundred Runes of Hardic are not the Hardic runes used to write the ordinary language. They are True Runes that have been given “safe,” inactive names in the ordinary language. Their true names in the Old Speech must be memorised in silence. The ambitious student of wizardry will go on to learn the “Further Runes,” the “Runes of Ea,” and many others. If the Old Speech is endless, so are the runes.
Ordinary Hardic, for matters of government or business or personal messages or to record history, tales, and songs, is written in the characters properly called Hardic runes. Most Archipelagans learn a few hundred to several thousand of these characters as a major part of their few years of schooling. Spoken or written, Hardic is useless for casting spells.