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All vowels in the Mage language are pronounced the same as are found in Spanish, Italian and Japanese. ‘a’ is pronounced as in the word “father” or “amen”; ‘i’ is “ee” as in the word “feed” or “seek”; ‘u’ is “oo” as in the word “pool” or “tool”; ‘e’ is the short “e” as in the word “bet” or “set” and ‘o’ is the “o” as in “home” or “phone.” There are no true diphthongs but ‘i’ can occasionally act as a ‘y’ as in the name Eiasa, pronounced, “e-ya-sa.”

The City accent or emphasis (ʹ) in words of three or more syllables usually falls on the second to last syllable while the Ritashra or aristo accent falls on the second to last syllable. For example, a Citizen would say, “Eiása” while someone from Ritashra would say, “Éiasa.” Another example differentiates the City pronunciation of Somaladéa with the Ritashra pronunciation of Somaládea.

Hli-Ma-Sa also follows the same rules for vowel pronunciations except for standalone or initial vowels, which are always preceded by a glottal stop (the ‘ seen in ‘A, ‘I, ‘U, ‘E or ‘O.) It’s the little catch you hear before the ‘o’ in English when someone says, “Oh-oh.”

Mage or City language is written in glyphs or logograms and can represent a sound, word, concept, phrase or a complete sentence. Traditional full glyphic forms have been supplanted over the last three and a half centuries by the ever-evolving and popular quick-glyph, which use truncated old-form glyphs, known as determinatives as foundations for prefixes and suffixes, which demark verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions and other grammatical conditions as well as guides to pronunciation. Original glyphic forms are more easily seen in determinatives, less so in truncates. Recently, Adjudicator Mezanlipat and the teaching staff at Artme Library, have compiled a catalog, Determinatives and Truncates in Current Use.  

The Hli-Ma-Sa written language is a syllabary of 360 characters of 30 letters in 12 forms commonly known as ladder writing and uses a stamp block in writing it. The language is agglutinative, comprised of root words with affixes.