abstract
| - Cardăsda is the sole official language of the Cardassian Union. Its status within the Union is comparable to that of Mandarin Chinese under Communist rule: While minority languages such as Kurabda continue to exist, their use is discouraged (and they are in some cases actively being extinguished). They have no official status and are referred to as mere "dialects" even though they are linguistically divergent enough to be considered languages in their own right. (Star Trek: Sigils and Unions) In the Sigils and Unions: Catacombs of Oralius universe, Cardăsda is more frequently referred to as the "common tongue" than by its official name and while it is--as the name implies--used as a Theonomy-wide lingua franca, its use has not in any way extinguished the use of local languages and dialects. By and large, Cardăsda words and sentences tend to run longer than their Federation Standard counterparts, in part due to a certain degree of grammatical redundancy. Perhaps because Cardassian hearing is slightly weaker than that of many other humanoid races, grammatical information has a tendency to be repeated and emphasized multiple times in a word or sentence. Given this relative deficiency (in the minds of other species), however, foreigners are often taken aback by the rapid clip of Cardăsda speech, which in some accents even seems to slur the very same vowels used to convey grammatical information.
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