"People are learning as they go, yes. It's to the west, and uninhabited."

"You're sure about that? The first setters on the Southern Continent thought it was uninhabited too. Then they thought the locals were just like talking parrots. Neither of those things turned out to be accurate."

"Point even ignoring the fact that hardly any of the continent is known thus far. If there are any sentient beings that can tolerate the presence of iridescence I haven't heard of them. Nor of, say, any particularly cunning-seeming varieties of beasts or fursh or bugs."

"Yes, the settlers thought that about the high levels of magic in some places; it turned out that mana crystals sometimes gain sentience, as do talismantic rock formations, and some trees. Or possibly all trees, if you believe the dryads, and we're just not very good at communicating with the remainder."

"...Have you any suggestions for how we could check for such things in our world?"

"They would... hmm. Actually, if you aren't familiar with angels - or perhaps you call us eidolons? Then, how is it that you're speaking the Holy Language?"

"Oh, no, that's Milliways' doing. We don't have anything recognizable as gods or any magic that's not the same kind everyone can develop the potential for."

"How did you end up with language, then? We had to bring language as the first blessing. Is it possible you had contact with the gods a long time ago, and then lost contact? Language could have drifted after that - one of the things we do is prevent linguistic drift, so it might have set in if you've somehow fallen out of touch."

"I have no idea, but there are, indeed, dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects and more whenever people separate enough. Focus on the sounds I am making and you'll see. Tree. Grass. Whispering. Rock. Food."

"That's... immensely bizarre," replies the angel. "I feel like I should be trying to correct your pronunciation, and also like I have no idea where to even start!

That's going to make it harder to identify if anything speaks, I suppose - that's what should have given it away to us, everything that speaks has a soul."

Oops, 'us' kind of lets the cat out of the bag about what side she came from. It probably doesn't matter, though, if everyone here is from some weird distant place rather than in the middle of a huge, intense war over the remains of the continent.

"The problem they had is that they were looking for material civilisation - cities, ships, that kind of thing - but the place they landed was mostly inhabited by nomadic tribes and people who dug into the hills and mountains, not city-builders. And then they made the mistake of underestimating them, which also didn't work out really well for anyone."