Like pretty much every other Pokémon animated series since Black/White, Pokémon Horizons has its own language. But the real question is: is it decipherable?

I won’t bury the lead: the answer is NO.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s cover the basics. First off, super mega thanks to the work Seq and nano did on the PA! Discord for working everything out.

So the script used in Pokémon Horizons is similar to other anime scripts, like Unovan, where it’s these nondiscript shapes which vaguely look like letters but couldn’t ever be mistaken for actual words. As for what it’s called… even though Liko and Roy come from Paldea, it’s definitely not Paldean. In fact, it seems to be used everywhere in the Horizons anime, despite the fact that they go to other regions. So unless someone in an episode actually calls the script by name, we’re just going to stick with “(the) Horizon script”.

Ultimately the Horizon script is made up of twenty characters, which are:

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T

The script is used in a lot of places, as you can see in the above pictures. However, it turns out that pretty much all of these uses are either completely random (and in that case, apparently the “F” character above is rarely used) or basically keysmashing. A perfect example of the keysmashing approach is found in this graphic:

If you match up each Horizon script letter, it’ll be something like:

GKFBICFB

ACFGKFCEBICIBECIBCEBCIEEBC
FABCIIBCFCNBJOCFBCI
AKBCBECIEFCHDKMOEKEEKF

DBCDKIBIKGCIBFGCIDEK
EKLOGCBKGC
ECIBICEBCFCAKLDKFCICEKI

And as you might be able to tell, there’s a lot of C’s, I’s, E’,s and K’s being used, almost as of the writer literally just went wglksglkgsdlkhsglkhdgslkhasgdlkhgkhdsglkhdsg on their keyboard. They thought we wouldn’t notice…

But the truly final nail in the coffin for the Horizon script being anything other than “consistently inconsistant” is when Horizon letters were attached to existing Pokémon, such as these below. They DID appear to match up with their Japanese names:

…however, it became quickly obvious that they didn’t mean anything in the end. Notice Skiploom’s Japanese name ポポッコ Popocco having two ポ PO characters but they in turn use different Horizon characters. Same with the ジ JI characters in both Deerling’s and Serperior’s Japanese names.

So… I’m afraid the script is nothing decipherable. But hey, there may be some other useful info about it worth looking into! And if you think you found something we missed, head over to the Language Institute channel on the PA! Discord and let us know!