So I've been playing Dive the Diver. It's fun, though I'm definitely becoming more and more resistant to games that stop your gameplay every five seconds to show you a little cutscene. I've also not finished it yet, but that's besides the point.
The point is there's a conlang in the game.
Okay, not a conlang. It's a conscript. OKAY, okay, it's an English alphabet cypher, WHATEVER!!
When I first saw this little conscript in the game, I was immediately excited. You know me (or you don't and you're about to). You know I love a conlang, and I was like hopeful that this would be a fun element used throughout the game. And it was! It's used a whole bunch! The fact that the sea people speak a different language is even a plot point, and you need to go find the parts to build a translator!
Now. I'm a fool, and was like oh, there must be some interesting conlanging going on here. Maybe not even on purpose, but I could tweeze it apart and figure out some grammar rules based on what's given, the way I did for Besź. I diligently went about screenshotting all sorts of samples and sat down to build a little fan-conlang. And discovered it was just a cypher.
It's fine, it's fine, I'm not mad about it. It meant there was something concrete to show and even though I was a little disappointed, I do have some fun finds to show off. I didn't look up if anyone else had already done this before giving it a go (and people have, of course; the game came out in 2023) but it's not about being the first to decipher it. It's about being a crazy conlanger who saw Potential.
The alphabet
Let's get it out of the way for anyone who just clicked on this to see the actual alphabet.
The process
Looking at the range of samples, the first thing to do was try to find some patterns. Remember, at this point I was intending to decipher it as though it was actually a different language.
The first assumption we have to make is reading order. There is both horizontal and vertical text in the game, like Japanese and Chinese, but those languages are read right-to-left in vertical formats. I wasn't sure which direction we should read the horizontal text in, but the speech bubble over on the right indicates that it should be left-to-right since it has punctuation.
Some text is also shown flipped. We can give a pass to the flags outside the arcade, since that's not unusual in the real world, but the Record Chamber has the same text flipped on either side of the large mural [below], and we even have a speech bubble with flipped text. I'm going to assume that this is canon rather than an asset-saving measure, the same way I assumed the languages as presented in The City & the City were completely canon.
Lastly, let's count the number of characters. It's a little hard to parse exactly how many individual characters there are, because there's a refreshingly nice range of character sizes and styles in the game, but the smaller/distance model text does make it a little more difficult to distinguish. I estimated around 25-26 individual characters. Which is when I was like oh, it's English.
So how do we get from a bunch of random letters to a fully translated cypher? The only word we really know for certain is "seed" thanks to the seed shop. The text is above the seed shop, it's on a sign with a big seed on it, and we see the same text on the other side of the map in front of a farm with a manatee spreading seeds. It's also a word with two of the same letter in the centre. It says "seed", guys.
The only potential issue is not know which direction to read this, but the first letter is larger than the rest so we can assume this is a capital, and we also know from before that text is read left-to-right.
From "seed" we can guess that this banner outside the restaurant [left] is "food" (again, it's outside a food shop, it's got food on the sign, and has two of the same letter in the centre). My next thought was that maybe this other sign on the restaurant [right] was "deal", but that's a pretty big leap of logic, and also, it turns out, a misunderstanding of what the second-from-the-top letter was. There are a couple of letters that look quite similar when you're first trying to figure them all out, especially when they're so small. I decided to see what else I could confidently deduce.
We have several other buildings in the village, almost all of which have some sort of text on them. For now we're not entirely certain what these could say, since the building names on the map don't quite fit the number of letters in the signs. "Arcade" does fit, but we already know the letters for D and E. Same with the sign over the restaurant; the sign has two of the same letters in the middle so I was originally thinking this said "foods" written from right-to-left, but we definitely already know the letter for D and that horizontal text is read left-to-right.
Let's come back to the village later and look at some other text.
When Dave first meets the sea people, Suwam has a little freakout and starts yelling. He only says 4 things total here; most of the dialogue is repeated and, as mentioned, one line is flipped to mirror, which is interesting. We really only have 6 letters to plug into this text for now but one line stuck out at me:
Those last two words both end in the same two letters, and the vowel in the third word is O. I've still pretty much only just arrived in the sea people village at this point, but I've read through some dialogue so I know some lore... is he saying "oh King Long"? Looking at some of our other text, we see the same two final letters reappearing over the door to the seahorse races [right] (this word also appears on the seahorse poster). If those letters are N and G, this would make sense as "racing". Bingo.
With L secured, we can look at the sign over the portal. You'll never guess what this says. It says "portal". We can fill in a couple more letters on the two signs on either side of the portal, and with context clues we can assume that these say "move" and "fast", which is cute.
It's pretty simple from there to decipher the rest of the text using context clues!
The translations
Signs outside the village
 mist lake |
 do not enter |
Dialogue
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
Front gate
Signs around the village
Seed shop
Restaurant
Portal
Workshop
Arcade
Temple
I'm still in the middle of playing, so if there are more examples to come, I'll put those up when I get to them.
The language
Even though the sea people script is an English alphabet cypher, there are still some interesting deductions we can make about their language based on what we've seen.
First of all, reading order for horizontal text is always left-to-right. However, vertical text can be either left-to-right or right-to-left. We see examples of both:
Left-to-right
 dumpling vege meet fish seaweed shrimp |
 sea people |
Right-to-left
 welcome to the village |
 we got fun and games |
 blacksmith |
 warkshop [not a typo] |
There's also the text in the portal, which reads left-to-right even though the letters are backwards:
Words don't have spaces between them, same as many East Asian languages. This means that words can be fragmented between different lines, as in the restaurant menu, but also that sentences run together with no clear separation between words.
|
donot [no gap] enter |
However, whole sentences can also be fragmented, even between entirely different signs:
  move - fast |
 dump - ling |
 read - this |
Suwam even says the same line of dialogue forwards and backwards:
|
oh king long |
 gnol gnik ho |
So what does this mean? The sea people language must have a free word order - that is, something about the construction of their words means that it doesn't matter what order you say something in, because the meaning will be the same. English has a very strict subject - verb - object order ("the dog bit the baby" is not the same sentence as "the baby bit the dog") but the sea people can say or read things forwards or backwards, and it has the same meaning. Which is interesting!
There's still more sea people text for me to decipher, but for now I'm gonna go play more Dave the Diver. See ya.