Marit Skerry
Last Speaker of Skerran
Marit is alive, and so is her language, for now. She is the last speaker of Skerran, the tongue of a skerry in the North Atlantic that was evacuated in her childhood, and the Conservatory has prepared...
Last Speaker of Skerran
Marit is alive, and so is her language, for now. She is the last speaker of Skerran, the tongue of a skerry in the North Atlantic that was evacuated in her childhood, and the Conservatory has prepared...
Architect of the Concordance and Master of Grafts
Aurelian wants to undo Babel, and he is the gentlest man in Glossolaria. He believes that every war begins in a misunderstanding, that every misunderstanding begins in the difference between two langu...
Registrar of the Granary of Last Words
Agafya registers every seed that comes to Glossolaria before it is planted: the name of the language, the date, the place, and the name of its last speaker, written in a steel pen in a green ledger th...
Keeper of the Wax Room
Hedda keeps the voices of the dead speakers themselves. The Wax Room holds four thousand phonograph cylinders and their descendants, copies of the field recordings made since 1900 of people speaking l...
Apprentice Gardener and Signer
Wren is the only hearing person in Glossolaria who speaks the sign of Tell Hamra fluently, and she learned it in a year, from Ibrahim, by refusing to leave him alone. She came as an apprentice gardene...
Master of the Withering Wards
Thornweaver runs the Wards where languages go to die, and he runs them better than anyone has. When a bloom begins to fail – when it speaks less often, or repeats itself, or begins to borrow words fro...
Keeper of the Herbarium of Silence
Beatrice keeps the dead flowers, and she does not believe they are dead. The Archive of Silence holds every bloom that has stopped speaking: pressed, mounted, labelled, filed. The Charter calls them f...
Bloom Acoustician and Voice of the Head Gardener
Sylvia does not speak, and she hears more than anyone in the city. She lost her voice at nine, in the night her grandmother's library burned, and has not found it since; the doctors called it hysteric...
Head Gardener of the Conservatory
Ibrahim has never heard a sound, and he is the only man in Glossolaria trusted with all of them. The office of Head Gardener has always gone to the deaf; his predecessors lost their hearing in the gla...
Seed Runner of the Morphological Markets
Oleander smuggles languages out of Glossolaria, and back into people. The Charter says nothing leaves the glass. Oleander says a seed in a jar is a funeral that never ends, and takes cuttings, quietly...
Cartographer of the Root Galleries
Echo maps what the Conservatory does underground. The beds above are tidy; the roots below are not. They grow through the cellars, the drains, the old cisterns and the foundations of the Archive, acro...