Language

The common language of Altierra is English, retaining a few archaic words from Spanish. Spanish is found in names (personal and place), except on Veridia where English names are more common.

Explanation

Although it was six Earth years, on Altierra it was 150 years between the English arriving and the Spanish. My thinking was virtually none of the English spoke Spanish but a few of the Spanish officers spoke English. For the Spanish conquerors to make use of the English, they had to learn English. Over the centuries, they forgot Spanish so by the time of my story, Spanish is still used for names and places, but English is spoken as a language.

That reframing makes the whole thing far more elegant, and it’s a genuinely well-attested linguistic pattern — you’ve essentially built the Norman Conquest in reverse-fast-forward. William’s Norman French was the prestige, administrative and religious language of England for a couple of centuries, but the conquered Anglo-Saxon population so vastly outnumbered the Norman aristocracy that within about three hundred years the descendants of the conquerors were speaking English as their mother tongue, retaining French only as borrowed vocabulary for law, governance, cuisine and rank — jury, parliament, duke, beef versus cow, mutton versus sheep. French supplied the labels; English supplied the grammar and the daily speech of the household, because that’s what the wet-nurses, servants and the overwhelming numerical majority spoke to the children of the elite.

Your Altierra situation is the same mechanism under harsher conditions. Biedma’s force was a battered remnant of Sarmiento’s failed colony — realistically a few hundred soldiers and settlers — set against an English population that the wiki puts at fourteen thousand, spread mostly across Veridia by the time of conquest. That’s not a demographic base from which Spanish survives as a living vernacular; it’s a base from which Spanish survives as the language of the pulpit, the court and the officer class, because that’s the only domain where the numbers were ever in the conquerors’ favour. And the Demon’s Mouth sealing itself eight years after the invasion removes the one thing that could have replenished Spanish as a spoken tongue — there’s no Cádiz sending fresh colonists, no clergy rotating home and back, nothing. Once that door shuts, the Spanish-speaking population is a shrinking island inside an English-speaking sea, and every generation of intermarriage and every generation of children raised by English-descended household Bestia tips the balance further.

That gives you a clean, defensible layering for the four and a half centuries between conquest and Meg’s arrival: English as the living, spoken, grammatically load-bearing language of Altierra — hence “aye”, “naught”, “I know not”, the whole Elizabethan-flavoured register already running through Toia and Fabra’s speech — with Spanish surviving only as fossilised prestige vocabulary. Titles (Doncella, Sacerdotisa, Sirviente, Doña, Maestra), place names (Rocosa, Sometria, Alta), personal names among the ruling caste (Valdez, Jesenia, Socorra, Laritza), and the technical vocabulary of Divara itself (Letanía, castigo, sumisa) — all Spanish, all untranslated loanwords sitting inside an otherwise English sentence, exactly the way “jury” or “mutton” sit inside modern English without anyone thinking of them as foreign. It also explains tidily why the Letanía de las Bestia is recited in English despite being named in Spanish — the prayer’s content had to be comprehensible to the caste reciting it and being drilled in it from age five, but its ecclesiastical label stayed in the founders’ tongue because labels are exactly the layer that survives longest in this kind of shift.

Two things worth deciding, if you want to take it further: first, whether any archaic Spanish survives outside proper nouns at all — a few ritual phrases perhaps, sworn oaths (“by Solvár”, which is already effectively that function) — or whether you want it strictly confined to names and titles for cleanliness. Second, whether the Illarión elite’s Spanish surnames are still understood as meaningful by anyone, or have become as opaque as most English surnames are to English speakers now — I’d lean toward the latter, since four hundred-plus years is more than enough for that kind of semantic bleaching, and it would mean nobody in-world thinks of “Bracamunda” as anything but a proper name, the way nobody today parses “Armstrong” as a description.

The idea of a few archaic Spanish phrases being used in speech without understanding intrigues me. I already have “gran” being used for large or big. Anything else come to mind?

Gran is a nice choice because it’s exactly the kind of word that would survive — short, phonetically simple, slots into English grammar without any awkwardness. A few more that would work the same way, words functional enough that nobody would think twice about their origin:

Anon is already yours from Middle English, but you could pair it with presto for “quickly” or “at once” — it’s got that same drop-in adverbial usefulness, and it’s plausible a soldier’s command vocabulary would keep a word for speed.

Naught you have; poco could survive as a diminutive tag — “a poco rest”, “just a poco further” — the way we still say “a soupçon” without knowing French.

For emotional register, bravo surviving as a general intensifier rather than just an exclamation of approval — “he was bravo angry” meaning very or fiercely angry — mirrors how loanwords often drift from their original narrow sense into something broader and grammatically promiscuous.

Solo for “alone” fits your existing “naught” register nicely — “she went solo into the woods” — and it’s a word with no real English rival close enough to crowd it out, which is usually what determines whether a loanword survives or gets discarded.

For the religious and social vocabulary specifically, since that’s where Spanish had its deepest institutional roots: firme surviving as “steady” or “resolute” — a soldier’s virtue word, “stand firme” — would sit well in Guardia speech. And cierto collapsing into a filler affirmative, like “aye, cierto” — a verbal tic rather than a real answer, the linguistic equivalent of “quite so.”

One structural point worth deciding: these survive best as function words or intensifiers rather than nouns for physical objects, because object-nouns get replaced quickly when the object itself changes or when a culture no longer needs the original word’s precision — whereas little grammatical glue-words (adverbs, intensifiers, discourse markers) are notoriously the last things to go in language shift, which is why English still has odd fossils like “amok” or “kaput” doing structural jobs nobody remembers importing.