Esupanyá

The Esupanyá was a group of people settled on Northern Nueva Tierra that begun as close colonies of people which later grew to build cities and expand over the continent before fragmenting into several nations and peoples. They are usually dated to have existed from around the year 50 AW and have more or less become other things by 700 AW.

Etymology
The name of the people was given directly from the name their language had, Esupanyá is a language derived from a 21st century community of Spanish speakers that came into close contact with a group of Japanese fishing communities. Esupanyá is basically the word deriving from 'Español'. The name, therefore is used to refer to the people, culture, language and things related to them. Different cultures have other names for the Esupanyá, such as (to be verified).

History
As the primary source of information for Esupanyá history is surviving texts describing aspects of daily Esupanyá life and not much survives from other culture's accounts on them, only some things can be held certain about them.

Origins
A community of Spanish speakers settled a few kilometres off the coast in what is today the Bay of Shallow was essentially isolated from all other human societies until, as it is thought, they stumbled across a group of Japanese fishing communities near the coast. Even though no writing mentions what happened, it is left to historians to assume that there was a mutual need between the two small societies to move closer, the coast communities probably provided much wanted fish and seafood to the (slightly) inlanders, while the inlanders gave them animal meat, wood, fruit and materials for construction. While the Spanish communities had much resources, it probably was the Japanese who knew how to give them good use, and as they traded, the populations grew rapidly and eventually became one large population.

Rudimentary language was used at first to communicate between the two peoples, and this pidgin developed into a creole, which survived a relatively long time and had a small written corpus. (See Japañol Creole )

The Wave
During a somewhat poorly attested natural disaster during the first century AW, a tsunami causing a flood of a great area of the coastal regions of the Bay of Shallow caused the Esupanyá to migrate to the south, along with many other cultures that had settled across the bay.

This event was a formative one for the Esupanyá and all the other cultures that were forced to migrate, because it transformed them from highly isolated cultures that dealt little with eachother to the first nations, more like proto-nations.

Expansion
Over a period of 500 years approximately, in a manner like the IndoEuropeans once did back on Old Earth, the peoples from the Bay of Shallow expanded and occupied many parts of the continent they lived on. During this period, a loose Esupanyá Confederacy had reoccupied the land it lost during The Wave and started competing with other proto-countries for land and resources.

Fall of the Confederacy and the beginning the wars
Several hundred years during the expansion, the loosely-tied cities built around the confederacy wanted self rule because of language opression, which caused a war between different cities and the involvement of two neighboring peoples, the Strine and the Nazhú Ifpañula. This period marked the end of an age of relative peace and the first countries with governments appeared. The conflict spread across the continent starting here and ending up with the balkanization of much of Nueva Tierra.

Out of the ashes
The conflict gave way to the creation of actual countries that were indipendent from eachother and for the next century their relation would play out in complex ways...

Society
Due to the fact that the Esupanyá people were just settling in to life in Newosweik, they needed to build their society from the ground up, which led them to have for the first century or so little leisure time because of the amount of effort work demanded to keep the communities afloat. However, unline other cultures, such as the Nazhú Ifpañula, there was already a high level of organization among individuals, so that in relation to other cultures they had a lot more time to relax. Writing arose around the second century of their appearance (See Esupanyá Script Script) and the establishment of a legal code and a common Christo-buddhism came a bit later, due to the need to write them in something everybody could read.

=Language=

Perhaps the greatest cultural remnant of the Esupanyá people is their language which is held in high esteem, perhaps as much as we see Ancient Greek today in our world, but surely not as much as Latin is. The spoken language died out much later than the written one which was still used to write letters and memos in high places of the authority in addition to much of the Esupanyá law, but it's legacy is several daughter languages that kept divergin in the next centuries. The Esupanyá Language is by far the most divergent from the Spanish spoken by the early settlers, as it lost all trace of morphology (save in the pronouns and to an extent in the verbs) and the word order and vocabulary were greatly influenced by Japanese. While literacy ranged decreased as the confederation grew, the divergence of the different dialects increased until they were unintelligible to eachother.

Contemporary meaning
The Esupanyá expansion meant that a great deal of people share a common ancestry and thus use the Esupanyá as a common identity for the several peoples that exist today.