The Gluonic people are a trans-dimensional immigrant community. Their largest population centre on Earth-0001 is based in the Lower Mainland area of British Columbia, Canada, especially the city of Surrey. Today, the best estimate is that there are over a half a million people worldwide who identify as Gluonic, 321,685 of them living in British Columbia, according to the 2011 Canadian census.

The original Gluonic home dimension is Alt-1136, first catalogued and observed by aetheriologists at the University of British Columbia in 1937. The Gluonic people arrived in 1938, fleeing their home dimension, which was undergoing a cataclysm due to the failure of ancient technology that had sustained its habitability. Over 100,000 Gluonic people appeared in a very short time on the campus of UBC through an aetherschist, apparently targeting their destination by homing in on UBC's aetherscope actively surveying their dimension. Subsequent aetherscope observations of Alt-1136 have found no surviving human life, so the refugees in British Columbia are believed to be the only Gluonic people to have survived to the present day.

The Gluonics themselves believe that they originally immigrated to Alt-1136 from another dimension where they were fleeing persecution for their religious beliefs. Because of the fact that the Gluonics are unambiguously human, and the fact that Alt-1136 itself is naturally inimical to human life, most aetheriologists believe their original home must have been one of the Earths, albeit a distant one. Gluonic religion is distinctive for mysticalising certain aspects of particle physics. The Gluonics believe that their ancestors came from every part of their original homeworld, and that they invented a new language to be a purifying and unifying influence for their society. They profess no memory or record of their pre-Alt-1136 societies and languages, however.

Classical Gluonic is putatively that original constructed language created to unite the people of Alt-1136. As the Gluonic language changed over the centuries, it had a role similar to Classical Latin relative to Vulgar Latin and vernacular languages in the Romance-speaking world as the primary literary language and language of education and high culture, having an enduring influence over vernacular Gluonic. The influence of Classical Gluonic apparently lessened over time, and the Great Departure has greatly accelerated that trend. But in order to study the Gluonic people and language seriously, it is invaluable to have some conversance with it.

Classical Gluonic is an inflecting language with strongly head marking tendencies. It has VSO default word order, but word order can be fairly free, it uses prepositions, and it has a general tendency to head-initial syntax overall. Its morphosyntactic alignment might best be described as "split intransitive," although it lacks role marking on nouns or pronouns. It tends to be relatively isolating, not typically building up long words from smaller parts, although this tendency is not extreme. Its most striking feature is that nouns, pronouns and adjectives have a quality called colour, of which there are three options, blue, red and green.

Colour has a gender-like function, with colour agreement between nouns and adjectives, pronouns and their referents, and verbs and their arguments, but colour is not an intrinsic quality of a word, unlike would be expected for gender/class, it is able to be assigned and reassigned arbitrarily. Colour assignment and reassignment morphology is an extensively-used device in Classical Gluonic and its living descendant, Modern Gluonic, and among other things, seems to serve a referent tracking role.

This site and its sister site dedicated to Modern Gluonic are intended to convey a description of these languages and Gluonic society and culture, both modern and historic, to my colleagues of the Canadian Aetheriological Symposium (CAS), and also to facilitate a discussion on mine and others' original research into this fascinating society. Although the Gluonics' level of technological prowess had fallen prior to their arrival on our world, this society at one time commanded a mastery of aetherics that far outstripped our own, and studying them potentially still has much to teach us.

Key Articles:

• Phonology and Romanisation
  Description of the sound system, syllable structure and general prosody, and the main romanisation systems.