South Coscivians

Not to be confused with Deep South Coscivians or Australic Coscivians.

South Coscivians
Déskax Koskem, Déskem

Total population
c. 50 million
Regions with significant populations
Kiravia South Kirav the Federation Overseas Regions	38,641,693 5,643,642 2,583,575
Caphiria	3,988,285
Languages
South Coscivian language
Religion
Christianity Coscivian Orthodoxy, Coscivian Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Discipular Church Islam Shi'a, Sunni, Ibadhi
Related ethnic groups
Thínoran Coscivians, Hekuvian Coscivians

South Coscivians, also known domestically as Southerners or Southrons are a Coscivian ethnic group inhabiting South Kirav. They are the second-largest Coscivian ethno-linguistic group after the Kir. Outside their core homeland in the states of Issyria, Merav, Andrēdan, and Xula, where they account for an absolute majority of the population, South Coscivians are the largest ethnic group in Trinatria and are also found in substantial numbers in other provinces of Middle Kirav and the Southwest, as well as in diaspora in Caphiria. Although not the only ethnic group native to South Kirav, the region's trans-ethnic identity, lifestyle, and history have been shaped primarily by South Coscivians.

Southern Coscivians are known for their unique cultural traits that distinguish them from the other regional cultures of Great Kirav and from the "mainstream" national culture of Kiravia at-large, especially their time-honoured and complex codes of civility, context-rich sense of social hierarchy, rich cuisine, and much beloved musical tradition.

Social Organisation

The basic unit of social organisation among South Coscivians is the lineage, conceived of as the unbroken patrilineal line of ancestors and unborn future descendants linked by the living generation. Individual South Coscivians are typically very aware and intensely proud of their ancestry, and typically know their family histories several centuries back, if not further. Southrons subjectively rank theirs and other lineages against each other based on a number of criteria, including length of their known history, how long they have inhabited their current area, wealth (current or historical), feudal, honorific, or Imperial titles, and notable ancestors. The prestige of a suitor's lineage is an important consideration in the arrangement of marriages.

South Coscivians pride themselves on their strong family lives and family cohesion.

Culture and Values

When contrasted with other Kiravians, both by themselves and by outsiders, South Coscivians are typically considered to be more grounded and organic than their neighbours, valuing direct relationships and local affairs over more distant and abstract values. Religion plays a very important role in South Coscivian life, reinforcing its family and community dimensions and acting as a force of order and continuity.

Land is the most important status symbol among South Coscivians, in keeping with their agrarian culture and manorial heritage. A great deal of agricultural land in South Kirav is entailed or held in hereditary or clan trusts to ensure that successive generations of a family will have valid claims to land and the income it generates. Landless South Kiravians will go to great lengths to acquire title or life tenure to land, even if it is economically unproductive, in order to obtain the social prestige that comes with property ownership.

Marriage & Kinship

Southrons are noted for their practice of first-cousin marriage, which distinguishes them from the Kir, Kalvertans, and many other Coscivian groups. In 21206, X% of marriages in Issyria were between first cousins and Y% among second cousins. Among Southern Muslims, marriages between parallel cousins are preferred, and account for Z% of Muslim marriages.

Agricultural Heritage

The ethnogenesis of the South Coscivians and their coalescence into a broad ethno-regional identity is tied closely to cereal cultivation, and the archetypal South Coscivian has always been a cereal farmer.

Recreation

Like other Kiravians, Southrons participate in the popular nationwide sports of fieldball (or "Kiravian-rules football") and shinty. Fieldball is an especially important cultural institution in Southern Kirav, where it is a key fixture of scholastic, university, and community life. Players from Southern states are greatly overrepresented in the ranks of the top professional fieldball leagues, although most professional teams are based in Northern cities. Southrons are noted for their continued enjoyment of pre-modern sports that have fallen out of mainstream popularity elsewhere in Kiravia and the wider world, such as equestrianism, archery, fencing, and falconry. Hunting is extremely popular among Southrons, both for sustenance (especially among the poorer classes) and for sport, and access to privately-held forests (which is often a hereditary privilege) is highly prized. South Coscivians frequently represent the Federacy in international-level competitions for shooting sports and archery.

Ghosts

Ghosts are a ubiquitous feature of South Coscivian reality. Whereas most Occidental and other Coscivian cultures understand ghosts as an abnormality or disturbance in one way or another, associated with tragic events and derelict places, South Coscivians proceed under the assumption that ghosts are always about and rarely cause for concern. Southern folk traditions prescribe all manner of simple invocations and rituals to pacify the restless shadows of the departed when they become a nuisance, based on the notion that most ghosts simply want to be acknowledged, and that once they feel seen and heard they will kindly fuck off.

Language

South Coscivians speak the South Coscivian language, also known as "Deskan". Deskan has more native speakers in the Kiravian Federacy than any language besides Kiravic. It belongs to the Tardic subfamily within the larger Trans-Kiravian/Cosco-Adratic family, and its closest relatives are the Knassanian and Tanuvrian languages. South Coscivian incorporates a heavy lexical substrate absorbed from the Intheric and Rulo-Swadeshi languages previously spoken in South Kirav before the expansion of Cosco-Adratic.

Religion

Religious Affiliation in South Kirav

  Christianity (62.4%)

  Islam (30.7%)

  Coscivian faiths (4.1%)

  Bahá'í Faith (0.8%)

  Other (2.4%)

Most Southern Kiravians are Christians or Muslims, with only a small minority adhering to Coscivian religions such as Sarostivism or Rotarionism. Localities in South Kirav tend to be homogeneous with respect to the religious and sectarian affiliation of their inhabitants, usually corresponding to the patronage of the local nobility from feudal times.

The Christian denominations among South Coscivians are the Coscivian Orthodoxy, Coscivian Catholicism, the Discipular Church of Kiravia, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Many Coscivian Orthodox parishes have seceded from the Coscivian Orthodox Church at various points in time, mostly due to its perceived domination by Northern bishops, and have instead joined the Southern Orthodox Church or entered into communion with the Eastern Orthodox Church or Catholic Church.

About one-third of South Coscivians follow Islam. [Sects n' stuff].

Although they share the practice with most other Coscivian groups, South Coscivians are noted for their devotion to ancestor worship in Christianised or Islamised form. South Kirav is home to a large number of ancestral shrines, each of which is associated with a particular lineage. These shrines originated as graveyards with chapels on site, but have grown over the centuries into large complexes containing numerous tombs and ossuaries. Most Southerners will travel to their ancestral shrine a few times each year to honour their ancestors with burnt offerings and libations.

Cuisine

South Coscivians have a celebrated culinary tradition with influence far beyond their native region. The warmer climate and more fertile land of South Kirav relative to the rest of the island continent endowed the South with a more varied repertoire of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices. Southern cuisine has been praised for its often complex combinations of flavours and cooking methods, but also as being hearty and filling, a duality thought to reflect the twin influences of professional cooks serving the South's landowning families and the practical, homestyle cooking of the common people.

Due to the larger cattle-raising industry in the South (particularly Korlēdan) and the use of steak and veal as status symbols by the upper strata of South Kirav's hierarchical culture, Southern cuisine has traditionally made much greater use of fresh beef than other Kiravian regional cuisines, which relied heavily on poultry, fish, pork, and preserved beef products. Beef as a distinguishing feature of Southern cuisine became even more prominent after the introduction of Islam to South Kirav, as Muslim converts abstained from pork and certain seafoods.

Some Southern dish

Southerners have a fondness for fried dishes that reflects the abundance of oil crops (canola, soy, corn) in the region and a long history of importing olive, coconut, and palm oil from Caphiria and South Levantia.

Southerners maintain that beer was independently invented in South Kirav in prehistoric times, as a logical development from intensive cereal cultivation. Archæological and phytogenetic evidence lends some credence to this claim. A longstanding dispute between South Coscivians and Antaric Coscivians concerns which people happened upon cool-fermentation techniques first, with Southerners claiming that their ancestors were the first in Kiravia to do so, warehousing beer in the caves of karstic Issyria to prevent spoilage during the region's longer and hotter summers. Christian South Coscivians are prolific consumers of beer, including table beer and mild ale as common soft drinks. The Corcoran Institution's Museum of Brewing and Distillation Arts estimates the number of market-traded beer styles native to South Kirav with a lower bound of 80, noting that cataloguing localised heirloom styles and farmhouse ales unattested in writing is a generational task, and that an indeterminately large number of family- and village-based brewing traditions died out during Kirosocialism.

Southern coffee culture is borrowed directly from its Caphirian counterpart. In contrast to their more northerly relatives, South Coscivians prefer the lighter roasts.

Ancestry

South Coscivians have a very even admixture of genetic markers associated with the Archæo-Cronan and Archæo-Levantine migrants to Great Kirav, whereas more northerly Coscivian ethnicities tend to have more ancestry from one prehistoric founder population or the other, depending on their region of origin. On average, they have a markedly smaller "Wanderer" contribution to their genetic makeup than their fellow Coscivians to the north.

Identity and Politics

South Coscivians have developed a strong identity and sense of distinctiveness that blends both ethnic and regional characteristics, which can manifest politically as nationalism, regionalism, subnationalism, and minority politics.

South Coscivian ethno-regional identity emerged during the early modern period in response to the contentious politics of the era, regional rivalries, and the pressures of modernisation on the traditional Southern lifestyle and economy. Prior to that era, the ancestors of today's South Coscivians enmeshed themselves in an overlapping web of more specific caste, village, patrilineal, religious/sectarian, feudal, and micro-regional identities. Despite overarching cultural commonalities and high mutual intelligibility across the South Coscivian dialect continuüm, premodern Southerners had little in the way of shared identity or popular solidarity.

[Evolution and consolidation of South Coscivian ethnic identity]
[Contrarian regional identity]
[Ethnic vs. regional nature]

South Coscivians have strong traditionalist and agrarian leanings in politics. On the state level, their general attitude of deference to authority and strong preference for stability and continuity have led to the establishment of dominant-party systems under the rule of parties affiliated with the Southern Green-Right conference. Most opposition parties are affiliated with the Agrarian Caucus, Organic Social Union, or the Monarchist Parties of Kiravia, and have limited influence.

On the federal level, South Coscivians are strong supporters of the Authentic Historical Caucus.

Diaspora

Millions of South Coscivians or people of South Coscivian descent live outside of the modern territorial theme of South Kirav, both in other parts of the Kiravian Federacy and abroad. The largest and most notable overseas population of South Coscivians is found in Caphiria. Most established families of the Coscivian minority in Caphiria trace their ancestry to South Kirav or the Baylands, a fact that is reflected in their home language, cuisine, music, and customs.

After the Kiravian Civil War, during which South Coscivians had overwhelmingly thrown in with the defeated anti-communist side, many South Coscivians fled the Kiravian Mainland. The largest share of these emigrants settled in Caphiria, where many already had relatives. Others relocated to the remaining Federalist-held colonies in Æonara and Sarolasta, or to other South Cronan countries, such as Paulastra and Tierrador. Smaller numbers of Catholic Southerners resettled in Urcea and the Levantine mainland, while a few Muslim Southerners took refuge in Rumelistan and other Muslim-majority states.