Old Beltonian

Old Beltonian (Bæmin Siðwade, Modern Standard Beltonian:Bémesiawri Cewl) was the earliest stage of the Beltonian language. It existed in the period from approximately 400 to 900, beginning with the divergence of Wistarian and ending with the divergence of Classical Beltonian from the vernacular dialects.

Old Beltonian was a continuation of the Proto-Beltonic language that was spread across Beltonia by the Beltonic Migration. It largely abandoned the nonconcatenative morphology of its predecessor, though elements of it survived in irregular noun and verb inflections. It remained a highly inflective language with a large number of cases and moods. It also pivoted towards a nominative-accusative alignment, merged two of the genders and introduced verb inflections by person, while mostly eliminating verb inflections by gender. In phonology and it introduced consonant clusters, reduced the number of guttural consonants while adding voiced stops as separate phonemes and expanding the palate of vowels. The language introduced loanwords from other languages, especially Greek, and to a lesser extent Latin, Arabic and pre-Beltonic languages.

The language had multiple dialects which diverged from each other but for the most part were mutually intelligible. In the Wistarian Marches there was a continuum of hybrid dialects between Beltonian and Wistarian. The Omchoke dialect dominated literature and was the basis of Classical Beltonian, while the southern dialects would ultimately have a greater influence on Middle High Beltonian and therefore the modern language.

The earliest writings of Old Beltonian are Beltonian Runes. From the 6th century onwards, the language was most often written in the Greek alphabet, and occasionally in the Latin and Arabic alphabets.