Something that's really interested me ever since we got the skinny on it was the advent of the Dragon Language within Skyrim. The fact that they had a guy sit down and study languages down until he had a very archaic yet familiar set of characters as it relates to us and then transferring that into something dragons can write is something that most companies would not even spend time with. As always, Bethesda has taken great care in constructing the world of their games in order to get people hooked into it. What they don't often do well, however, is actually having practical implications for these cool things so that they're actually applicable to the player.

I guess it's sort of nice that the Dragonshouts have to actually be combined in order to use, but I can imagine how much of a pain it will become when you get into learning a lot more of the dragon language. If you are going to have something that complex though, why not call the player to go above and beyond? What I'm saying is having the player learn to understand Dragonspeak in a rudimentary way. This is not to say that Skyrim becomes a sort of Rosetta Stone for nerds but instead it means that the basic phrases we learn in order to use Dragonshouts become the baseline for understanding dragons. It has been confirmed that draons speak, so why not have them actually speak in the way they are meant to speak.

I recall a side mission in the game Knights of the Old Republic where you had to deduce an alien child's speak from the actions that went along with the dialogue. This involved a lot of trial and error and an inability to fail, but it felt rather satisfying after I solved this particular puzzle. Skyrim does not have the same sort of dialogue system as KotOR though, so how could this be implemented? Well first off I'm going to make another assumption here based off of scant evidence. It is said that there is a Dragonshout that will allow you to summon a dragon. I think, from this, we might be able to keep said dragon (or some unsaid dragon) as a companion through the game. Basically the situation would go as thus:

The dragon companion, when prompted, will speak to you in Dragonspeak as well as having the subtitles in the Arabic spelling of Dragonspeak words. After it is spoken, there will be several dialogue options (in English) of things that you guess came out of that conversation choice. If you guess something wrong, the dragon will say what a buffoon you are in his tongue and you will have the chance to try again until you get it right. It's a rudimentary system, but it would slowly teach you about your companion and about dragons in general.

I, personally, am just going to smile with glee when I see people writing novels in Dragonspeak and yelling "FUS RO DAH" at conventions. If they pull off this intricate language well, then it could well be a new phenomenon that will overtake the RPG crowd. As it is right now, I can imagine many directions they could take this concept which is core to the game and make it into something that is really lasting and memorable. Anyone else have any ideas to the extent of the dragon language? Will you write a book in Dragonspeak? Post below!

But most of us can't read Dragonspeak, so what's the point of writing books in it?

A pet dragon is a sweet idea though. Pets are a wonderful idea in Skyrim. I'd love a pet troll or a pet dog...or a pet dragon.

A moment of silence for our lost squibs and pack rats.

/mourn

And then come the "holy wars" when the Klingon-speakers try to rout the upstart infidels...

Y'know, this really could make for some fun.

Pretty much exactly what I was thinking when I was typing this up. There have been entire disks related solely to teaching Klingon and it's pretty darn hilarious. Obvious Elder Scrolls doesn't have as much of a pull as Star Trek, but if this language is used to even a small degree of it potential we will end up with some epic stuff.

The dragon language isn't really a language, it's a word-replace with a unique alphabet. It is a nice touch, for sure, but a real language has its own grammar rules and such (see Tolkien's Elvish language for a real made-up language, though I understand even that barely counts).

^ +1

Guys, language is a way of thinking. The player would look at a sentence in the dragon language, translate it letter for letter and come out with gobbledygook. Then translate word for word and still come out with gobbledygook. The dragon language is almost guaranteed to be a cipher.

Yeah but it also has its own eccentricities such as no tense, conjugation or upper or lower case in writing. There are also rudimentary rules of word formation.
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/01/20/skyrim-s-dragon-shouts.aspx?PostPageIndex=2

Well that, and consider: Given that every TES game since Morrowind (at least) has spawned enough mods to constitute several more games, and enough fanfic to fill a small private library- is it so unthinkable to believe there might be enough people "geek enough" to finish fleshing Dragon language out?

i dont want to talk to dragons in dragon language it would probably be like:
dovahkiin: (in dragon language): Hello!
dragons head explodes
dovhkiin: oops musta spelled it wrong xD

Exactly. Obviously there are certain little things about it as it comes to sentence structure. The trailer's chorus shows that sentences can be made from the language, and we know that the dragons do in face speak the language to each other. With a few grammatical rules it could easily become a viable language to use.

I thought dragonspeak would be similar to the Ultima series words of magic and their correspondive runes. In Ultima you'd create for example a minor heal spell with rune combination IBM (In Bet Mani = create small healing) and cure poison with AN (An Nox = negate poison). I'm not expecting anything more linguistically sophisticated.

That's how it works in terms of gameplay, and in a very streamlined way, but it's all ready been shown that such sophisticated use is possible. You wouldn't add the word 'the' to your repertoire unless you were going to make actual sentences with it.