Remember the mysterious swirling tongue scattered around Delfino Island from Super Mario Sunshine? Probably not, and that’s okay — this is a 20-year-old game, after all. But that didn’t stop one YouTuber from joining the channel 2CPhoenix from digging a little further. Yes, if you haven’t guessed by now, the language has been translated.
This was not easy. The ‘Dolphian’ language (as 2CPhoenix called it) is quite hard to find on Delfino Island. It can only be found in three levels of Sunlight where it is often inflated to the point of illegibility or obscured by some other object. In short, you won’t get it unless you are immersed in the culture of the island.
And so 2CPhoenix made the code. Once one ‘Dolphic’ word was established by comparing it to the in-game Pinna Park brochure map, the quest to find the other letters of the alphabet was on.
You can watch the YouTuber’s linguistic odyssey in the video above. From the humble beginnings of translating five letters to decoding the entire alphabet, 2CPhoenix unpacks almost every instance of ‘Dolphic’ in the game and brings it to English, Italian and even Japanese.
Who will be the first to make a Delphic tattoo ‘Live, laugh, love’?
