This year for Worlds 2025, I’m releasing four custom cards to help promote Pokémon Aaah!, and I want to share more info about each card being released. The second promo card is “Bea’s Hitmonchan”:
But wait, it’s not in English or Japanese? What’s going on here?? Well, you’ve probably seen the text before: it’s the “language” used since Pokémon Sword/Shield… originally called “Galarian” but after appearing in other places we’ve started called it “PokéLatin“. So for Bea’s Hitmonchan, I wanted to make a card that might appear in the Galar, Paldea or Kalos regions. Of course if you don’t speak PokéLatin, here’s a handy translation:
So what exactly is “PokéLatin”? Does it mean anything? Long story short: it’s complicated.
First off, here are all 41 letters of PokéLatin: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcefghijklmnopqrstw … Some appear to be uppercase or lowercase versions of the other, but it’s largely arbitrary.
Despite it appearing to be a useful script, it’s not one that maps one-to-one to any other script or language. In fact, it appears that it was deliberately designed to both resemble a ton of other scripts of languages from around the world (Latin, Japanese, Cyrillic, Korean, etc), and it does map to certain names and words consistantly… but there’s also a lot of situations where it’s clearly randomized gibberish. Research is still ongoing concerning how consistant it is: we even have a dedicated channel on our Discord for discussing PokéLatin and other Pokémon languages.
If you want to dive into what we do know, check out these pages:
- PokéLatin (Galar/Paldea/Kalos) Alphabet Guide — the full story of PokéLatin (so far)
- Galarian Word List — words that appeared first in SwSh
- Paldean Word List — words that appeared later in ScVi
- Kalosian Word List + Changes — words that appear in Z-A (though the game is still unreleased as of this writing)
- Character Inspirations — info about what might have inspired each character
- PokéLatin Garbage Text (aka “Lorem Ipsum”) — trying to keep track of what is NOT usable text but instead “garbage text”
Now if you’re an artist and want to use PokéLatin text in your own artwork, we have a FREE font you can use called Thraex Magnus. It contains all the (currently known) PokéLatin characters, including the unique diacritics introduced in Z-A, but also enough useful punctuation so that you can use it for your own projects. Here’s the font map below. I can’t wait to see what you make with it!
If you want to share your own theories about what this all means, or maybe just share your own PokéLatin artwork, check out our social media pages:
We hope to see you there!