Omrazir: Culture

Omrazir is home to a wide variety of peoples and cultures, but Sirdabi of pure and mixed heritage make up the largest of all these groups, with a bit under half the permanent population of the city. Tessouare are the next most populous group, followed by Salawi. After these larger groups come representatives of all the peoples of Idiri, along with a sizeable number of expatriates and members of various outside peoples that altogether account for between five and ten percent of the entire population.

The majority of expatriates from the north are of Kalentoi origin, with a large number of mizado Cadenzans among them, while many among the foreign mercantile community have roots in Volusia and the Copper Isles. Shipping crews from Jalanjhur often pass between the two countries, but few individuals stay in Omrazir for any length of time. Sailors and merchants from Jalanjhur may be encountered along the docks as well, but most Jalanit prefer to visit the more conveniently located cities along the southeastern coast of Idiri instead.

Due to the prominence of Sirdabi in the city's racial and cultural makeup, men are by far the more influential sex in Omrazir. Women, while not precisely unvalued, tend to be regarded more as possessions of men than persons in and of themselves, and in general whatever freedom they have is dependent on the attitudes of their husbands, fathers, brothers, or other men in their lives. Seething undercurrents of envy, hostility, and general misunderstanding exist between Sirdabi women and their freer counterparts among other peoples and cultures. Some Sirdabi women have begun to push back against relatively recent infringements upon their freedom and self-determination, wishing to return to the traditions of several hundred years ago when Sirdabi women had significant power of their own.

The language chiefly spoken in the city is Sirdabi, though the Omrazi dialect is a particularly vibrant and dynamic one that incorporates words and phrasing from the many races and cultures that mingle within the city's bounds. Tessouare is widely spoken, with Bissa, Kalentic, and even Ruvic also frequently used. The last serves as a means of communication with people from western Ruvera such as Volusians, but is also spoken in a few enclaves within the city, a surviving relic of the days when Omrazir was a part of the Ruveran Empire. It is not uncommon for people to hold conversations incorporating multiple languages across several minutes, or sometimes even within a single sentence.

Due to the presence of so many different peoples and cultures within Omrazir, it is sometimes difficult for the outsider to define what exactly constitutes true Omrazi culture. Even the city's holy days tend to be an unusual jumble of tenets and traditions appropriated from multiple sources and jammed into a sometimes contradictory whole. The key character that typically strikes visitors is the quality of electric liveliness that runs through the city, a sense of teetering precariously and exhilaratingly on a knife's edge of possibility and peril, expressing itself variously as exuberance or vehemence or outright violence depending on the parties and circumstances involved.