Insular Golic Vulcan was called >Viikuftra-Goliik< (Insular/Island Golic) or >Viikuftra-Gol-Vuhlkaniik< (Insular/Island Golic Vulcan) by its speakers.

Like the other Golic languages, IGV was a "compounding" language. Basic words and roots were put together to make new words, a lot like the Germanic languages of Earth. Most compound words have a " - " (>pakh<, similar to a hyphen) separating their roots. Just like its related tongues, it followed Saga'sek's Third Word Law which states, "No more than three root words can combine to form a compound word, although a full word triad can take prefixes and suffixes."

And just like MGV, IGV built up new vocabulary by "recycling" obsolete words or adopting words from other languages.

IGV is an affixing language. Prefixes and suffixes are added to words (simple or compound) to modify them. Like in TGV and MGV, nearly all words corresponding to prepositions are prefixes. These are usually separated from the word they modify by a Vulcan "half-stop" (>ulef-pekhaya<) or " ' " (similar to an apostrophe). When new to the language, it is easy to confuse a compound word with an affixed word. Also, certain ancient words handed down or adopted from extinct languages, like "t'forti" (finally), may look like they are prefixed but they are not. Memorizing the historical exceptions will help to prevent confusion later on.

Finally, IGV is a "syntactic language", meaning sentence construction and word order can determine shades of meaning. There are no declensions and few inflections to cause confusion.

See the three charts on the IGV Affixes Page at the link below for examples of grammatical and modifying affixes.

Most IGV words came in what were called verb-noun word pairs. If you know the verb, you can often determine the related noun, or vice versa. Most IGV verb-noun pairs followed one of several standard patterns. The table below shows the most common forms with sample words:

As a syntactic language, sentence order was very important in IGV. The verb was almost always placed first in the sentence, although it may move for emphasis. Subjects were placed before objects in the sentence. The language was "contextual" in that understood or previously mentioned things were seldom repeated, unless needed for emphasis. Non-Vulcans sometimes have a tough time understanding a conversation when pronouns, subjects, objects, and even verbs are dropped out. Vulcans usually find it wasteful to use more words than are truly necessary to get a point across. Normally full word usage was only done in teaching situations or formal literature.

The position of stress varies in IGV words, although purists often put the stress on the second part of a compound. Remember not to count prefixes and suffixes when determining stress. The root word, whether compound or not, is often what stress is based on.

The Vulcans who speak GV use three main styles of writing the consonants and vowels of their language. Each of these styles has a specific place in Vulcan life and society. Although they are known by various names, the most widely accepted names are Ceremonial, Common and Media. It is very easy to tell the different styles apart from each other.

The "Ceremonial Script" (Vaan-Sukitan) is the most ornate style, preserving a certain amount of the ancient pictographic nature of Vulcan languages. This script is used for most inscriptions, official legal and family documents, and all major literary works. This is the style that Surak and his contemporaries used throughout their writings.

The "Common Script" (Tsuuk-Sukitan) is that used in day-to-day life for writing notes, work, journals, correspondence, etc., and for any use that the "Ceremonial" is not appropriate. It is not as intricate as the "Ceremonial" and is much easier to write.

The "Media Script" (Hiitra-Sukitan) is a simplified form used for mass-produced printings and computer displays, for example. After contact with Earth and the formation of the Federation, the Media Script was simplified further to allow it to be displayed on FSE-based systems. Greek and other symbols are used, allowing any computer in the Federation, without special software, to be able to type the simplest of Vulcan scripts. See link below for information.

The Ceremonial Script is nearly always written top to bottom. The Common Script is written either top to bottom or left to right, depending on the writer and style. The Media Script always appears left to right.

At the following link, you will find a page with a chart of the Golic Common Script's consonants, as a sample. More pages on scripts will eventually be added.

The alphabetic system used in Insular Golic Vulcan (and Traditional and Lowlands Golic Vulcan) is made up of 30 symbols in all. The Insular Golic Vulcan order of their letters is:

In the early days of Earth-Vulcan contact, before the United Federation of Planets was formed and FSE was formalized, an inaccurate transliteration alphabet was devised for FSE speakers and many errors have continued to the present. You often see "y" written instead of the more accurate "ai", for example. This is because the "y" in English is a consonant or a vowel, whereas in Vulcan it is only a consonant. You can still see "feyhan" and "kreyla" instead of "feihan" and "kreila". Also, the IGV letter "dzh" is often incorrected spelled "j" and "ks" as "x", although those characters do exist in other languages. The Vulcan Language Transliteration Conference of Stardate 6550.0 updated and corrected mistakes of the past. All our works use those official Federation transliteration/spelling rules.

Numbers or numerals come in five forms in Golic Vulcan: Cardinal, Ordinal, Enumerating, Combining and Adjectival. See the following chart at the link below for the various IGV forms.

There was no definite article in IGV. For example, the word "ek'ser" can mean "jewel" or "the jewel". Although this is confusing to many non-Vulcans, the Vulcans have no trouble because context dictates the intent. The use of indefinite articles (a, an) was used in Insular Golic only for emphasis.

Plurals are often understood through context or by the use of pluralizing words, such as a number. In those cases, the word does not change its form. A pluralizing direct suffix, (~laar), existed in Lowlands Golic Vulcan, similar to the "~s" of FSE.

When a construction like "a flock of birds" or "a pod of whales" is used in FSE, the type of animal is pluralized. In IGV, equivalent constructions are not pluralized, since the collective word automatically indicates there is more than one animal. For example, "treit t'kuusel" (literally, "flock of bird") or "kut t'sehlat" (literally, "herd of sehlat").

Although many Federation languages have interrogative symbols, IGV does not -- there is no question mark. "Yes or No" questions were formed by using the word >haa< at the very end of the sentence. Other questions were formed by using a questioning word like >wiilat< (where) at the end of the sentence. To aid offworlders with the language, though, a question mark is often used in transliterated Vulcan (but never with true written Vulcan).

Invectives are a way to "vulgarize" words. They encompass the grammatical formation in FSE of "darn", "damn", and worse words in an adjectival way. In IGV, they were formed by directly prefixing nouns and came in two forms: Mild Invective and Severe Invective. Mild was comprised of >kr~< before a vowel sound and >kraa~< before a consonant sound; Severe was comprised of >kriik~< before a vowel sound and >kriika~< before a consonant sound. Never use these in speech with cultured Vulcans or you may find yourself in a psychiatric facility for a mental health evaluation! Because of their distaste, most Vulcans may refer to this type of speech as "Gutter Mode", if they speak of it at all.

In IGV, there were a number of examples of one word used for normal usage and a variant used when addressing or referring to something or someone "honored" or "greatly admired". This is to be expected in a culture such as that of Vulcan. In addition, there was a prefix >oo~< -- which has no exact FSE translation but "honored" is considered closest in meaning -- that was directly affixed to the word it modifies. Examples: >Oosuu<, literally "honored person", but usually translated as "sir" or "madam", depending on the context; and >oosavensuu< (honored teacher), which is nearly always used in preference over >savensuu< (teacher). The honorific prefix is especially common in Traditional Golic and Insular Golic.

In Insular Golic there were two modes of speech: Superior and Normal. (There are three modes of speech in Traditional Golic: Superior, Normal and Inferior.) One who is superior in standing to or much older than another person used the "Superior Mode" form of many words in speech. These words tended to be more ancient forms of words. In addition to using the older forms of words, superiors also tended to be more formal in their use of the language, not dropping out as much as the normal speaker did. An example of this is that in "Superior Mode" one tended to use indefinite articles and full word usage most of the time, where in "Normal Mode" they were more often dropped. Throughout our material, we will mostly concentrate on "Normal Mode", as that is the mode perhaps 90% of Vulcans use. Since this is an introductory grammar and not a comprehensive guide, we will not go into this subject any further at this time.

In Insular Golic Vulcan, there were five main marks used in punctuation:

" - " pakh (stroke) - used in affixing or compounding words, and as a comma or semi-colon is used in FSE
" -- " dah-pakh (double-stroke) - used as a colon or long dash is used in FSE
" ' " ulef-pekhaya (half-stop) - used to separate affixes from base words
" . " ek'pehkaya (full-stop) - used as a period is used in FSE
" .. " dah-pehkaya (double-stop) - used for emphasis, similar to an exclamation mark in FSE

Many Vulcans use what is called ek'pakh (full-stroke), a line about the length of three pakh marks, instead of dah-pakh. This is the older form and is preferred in literature or religious texts. The writings of Surak always used the ek'pakh instead of the dah-pakh. The dah-pakh was popularized by its use in the media script and we will use it here for typographic reasons.

As stated before, there is no question mark in Golic Vulcan. There are additional specialized symbols used in typography and science, but we will not discuss them in this particular material. A future page may focus on typographic and scientific symbols.