The humans of Teravide appear at first glance to be a generally homogeneous bunch: most everyone from Fillion to Lessard speaks the Common tongue, eats the same foods, toils in more or less the same fashion, wears similar styles of dress, practices religion within the same general belief system, and enjoys the same recreation, games and sport.  However, this apparent homogeneity is a fairly recent invention, and has come about through the gradual, and occasionally violent, melding of two different settler groups.

The first of the groups to arrive were the Nordiques, some two millennia ago.  The Nordiques were a fierce, and originally semi-nomadic warrior people.  They organized themselves in family-based clans, with leadership typically revolving around military prowess.  The smaller and weaker clans owed fealty to the more powerful clans among them.  Over time, this organization developed into the elaborate feudal political and economic systems seen in Aubry, Emond, and to a lesser extent, the Empire Nordique.  The Nordiques spoke what is now called the Haute Langue (once simply known as Nordique), a delicate and lyrical language that belies the warlike nature of its progenitors.  They worshipped a panoply of gods, especially Robitaille and Thibault, although some were given to worshipping nature spirits and their ancestors as well.  They were a notoriously unmagical people, and were thus often at a disadvantage when dealing with the savage creatures of Teravide, and the other civilized races who settled the continents at approximately the same time.

A thousand years later came the Whistlers, who first arrived in the eastern part of Gervais.  Although they were a far less martial people than the Nordiques, they were technologically and socially more advanced, and they quickly subdued or displaced most of the Nordique states of the east and south.  Lacking feudal traditions, the states they built (including Tardiff and Mulvenna) were republican, or more typically, plutocratic in nature.  The Whistlers were a far more curious and inventive people than the Nordiques were.  Though their invasions were extremely disruptive, the Whistlers also brought stronger social and economic institutions to humankind, enabling them to wholly dominate Teravide by the modern year 1.

Over the span of several centuries of rivalry, warfare and state-building, a sort of dual assimilation took place: the Whistler elites adopted Nordique names, titles, and an aristocratic outlook, while at the same time the vast bulk of commoners became Whistlerized, speaking what is now called the Common tongue, and worshipping Whistler gods (albeit with retrofitted Nordique names) like Fiset, Langevin, and Matteau.

Nowadays, humankind in Teravide can be described as a small group of Nordique or Nordicized elites, interspersed within a large homogeneous Whistlerized mass.  There are some regional variations, of course -- as an example, the herdsmen and fishermen of the far north tend to be elvenized in their traditions and outlook -- but these exceptions are few and far between.  Rather than representing ethnicity or background, the human languages have become class markers: the Haute Langue is the language of the nobility (to the extent that it still remains in Teravide), the arts, record-keeping, and a few of the wealthier elements in the old Aubrien and Imperial territories; the Common tongue is used by everyone else.  Worship has standardized on a mixture of Nordique and Whistler gods, but with Nordique names.  Whistler egalitarianism has largely replaced Nordique martial virtue and patriarchy, and in the aftermath of the Drouiniste wars, feudalism is mostly dead in Teravide.