What language are the Panzer Dragoon songs sung in?

Nearly all of the dialogue in the first Panzer Dragoon (1995) is spoken in what has been dubbed Panzerese, a made up language documented as drawing on Ancient Greek, Latin, and Russian. It was a world building decision with a practical shadow: a language no player on Earth speaks makes a ruined, alien world feel equally foreign to everyone who visits it, in Japan and overseas alike.

The language reaches its peak in Panzer Dragoon Saga (1998), the series' role playing game, composed by Saori Kobayashi and Mariko Nanba. The game pairs full Japanese voice acting with Panzerese speech, and its ending song, Sona Mi Areru Ec Sancitu, glossed in English as Art Thou the Holy Angel, is sung entirely in Panzerese by vocalist Eri Ito. The album credits give the Panzer language lyrics to Shiro Maekawa. Reviewers who cover the soundtrack single the song out two decades on: a closing theme the listener cannot understand a word of, which lands anyway, because the melody carries what the words withhold.

The song's makers returned to it. In 2018, for the game's twentieth anniversary, Kobayashi arranged twenty tracks from Saga for the album Resurrection: Panzer Dragoon Saga 20th Anniversary Arrangement, released by Brave Wave, and Eri Ito came back to sing, closing the new album with the same Panzerese song. An invented language, built for one game world, turned out to have a twenty year memory.