The Tongue
A language-evolution simulator: generate a proto-language from a seed, steer its sound changes, and watch it fracture into a family of daughter languages as geography divides it.
About
Pick a numeric seed and the game procedurally generates a proto-language: a phoneme inventory, syllable templates, a 32-word core lexicon, and a 4x3 terrain map. From there you steer its evolution, applying sound changes and holding off weighted autonomous drift in which cross-linguistically common rules are weighted higher. As geography divides the territory, communities split by impassable terrain diverge into independent daughter languages, and a mutual intelligibility matrix tracks how far apart the family has grown using normalised edit distance across the shared concept list. Deployed live at the-tongue.vercel.app.
Highlights
- Procedural language generation from a numeric seed: phoneme inventory, syllable templates, 32-word core lexicon, 4x3 terrain map.
- Sound-change system with weighted autonomous drift and player-steered changes; cross-linguistically common rules weighted higher in drift.
- Mutual intelligibility matrix uses normalised edit distance across the shared concept list to track family divergence.
- Geographic fracture mechanic: communities split by impassable terrain diverge into independent daughter languages.
- Deployed live at the-tongue.vercel.app; built with Svelte 5 runes and Tailwind CSS v4.
By the numbers
- Commits
- 159
- Lines added
- +21,204
- Lines removed
- −1,625
- Source files
- 12,076