thequantumwritings came up with this neat concept for Common as a language in fantasy settings. Usually we think of common as simply a convenient narrative device, but this goes into the two possible origins:
Source: thequantumwritings
Common Language in Fantasy
Yeah…. that weird mishmash of words yoinked from other languages and weird & seemingly illogical grammatical constructs? That’s just English.
Historically, a Common tongue isn’t at all outlandish; and it doesn’t have to mean that empire was ever involved. Throughout the ancient world, Greek was common; though that was because of empire. But so was Gaulish: a trade tongue common to the times and yet not forced upon people by empire, but by the sheer necessity of a tongue held in common for trade purposes. The Gauls never conquered anyone.
The Celtic peoples travelled extremely long distances – all the way to China and down into at least Egypt – so their most common tongue carried a lot of trade currency. Many spoke it, because they were sure to find someone on the trade roads to do business with who either shared that language or who had a close acquaintance that did and was willing to translate it for them. We generally refer to such languages as lingua franca – languages of commerce and business – and they’re a common feature of history around the world.
Now, before you go on about ‘real-world whiteness’ and how it’s allegedly parallel to some nonsensical idea of tongues held in common between races due solely to such a phenomenon being the result of past human imperialism, I’d suggest you try visiting Japan. A country where everyone not considered Japanese is gaijin and less, and the native Ainu are despised and treated as outsiders despite having been there FAR longer than the modern Japanese.
You see, contrary to the current American political narrative, white people aren’t evil conquering monsters any more than every other group on the planet is. And the belief that they are is nothing more than a sign of precisely how much the American education system is letting its citizens down, particularly in the area of world history.
I’d heartily recommend that you go back and re-study your history; and pay special attention to the Ottoman Empire, the Empire of Mali, the history of Imperial China, and then the Egyptian and Persian and Sumerian and Assyrian and Babylonian Empires etc. What you’re quickly going to find is that EVERYONE is the descendant of imperialists at some point in their bloodline, and NO-ONE is a conquering piece of trash by virtue of their birth. What you’ll also find, if you study your history honestly, is that it happens to be an empire of ‘white’ people (the British Empire) who single-handedly brought worldwide legal slavery to an end, and whoeven went out of its way in the process of doing so to fund other nations’ slaves’ attempts to end the practice.
So this ‘real-world whiteness’ garbage is exactly that: garbage. And the idea of a tongue held in common across the world of commerce has NO RELATION WHATSOEVER to that trash; because it’s actually a matter of real-world fact, with several demonstrable examples. A fantasy Common thus makes sense for a lot more reasons than claims of prior human imperialism, and doesn’t need to provide any kind of background flavour in that direction to be believable.
I can’t like this but thank you. I see it as since humans have short and ever evolving lives, they picked up common as their main language rather than use the short lives to learn multiple languages.
So, you read the first part and decided you just HAD to rant about it without noticing that part two does speak about the phenomenon of a language spreading (and evolving) due to trade?
“Wawawa, how can you say me hitting Susy over the head with my toy car is bad when Benny did it to Thomas?!” Newsflash from a German: “others did it too” does exactly zero to make ones own nation’s actions less bad. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Just accept it and try to do your part that there are no repetitions.
So a comment that would be racist if applied to any other ethnic group gets to stand unchallenged because it’s not racist if it’s directed against whites, right? The only exceptional thing about white imperialism is that whites had the technology to do it more extensively than before, and that they were the last to do it… as it was whites that ultimately decided it was no longer appropriate to do despite being in the position of strength at the time. “Others did it too” is not an excuse, but it does show that it’s not a crime specific to one group, despite how some people try to paint it that way, and the unfortunate fact is that over the span of human history, it’s been a fairly recent revelation that taking another nation’s land and subjugating its people is wrong (and even more unfortunately, there are some in power that haven’t got the message).
Something you’ve also missed is that part of Amhairghen’s point was that the story was providing a false dichotomy – that one culture’s language could ONLY become a lingua franca if it was the result of imperialism, and that without imperialism, any “trade tongue” would be a mishmash of terms and grammar from different languages (which is, ironically, a pretty good description of English and why it’s so confusing).
That’s the “part two” you claim Amhairghen missed, but there is a third option: you have a culture that has a mercantile focus. Let’s say that, hypothetically, there is a human culture who trades with halflings for agricultural produce, elves for exotic herbs and fine woodwork, dwarfs for forged metalwork, merfolk for fish and pearls, and so on. So the halflings learn human for trading, the elves learn human for trading, the dwarfs learn human, the merfolk learn human… and the most travelled of the human merchants know enough of the languages of each of their trading partners to get by. And then one day a dwarf meets a merfolk and despite their cultures having had essentially no direct contact before that point, they both know the human language because they’ve both been trading with humans and can therefore use that language to communicate.
And that’s how what started as the language of one culture becomes a common tongue without being enforced by imperial power.
Of course, such a language is probably going to be filled with loanwords, because why come up with your own name for something when you can just use the same name that the people you bought it from used?
Old English came from the border of the Danelaw and Saxon lands, it is trade talk. This is why there is a very definite means for things and number, none of the poetic alliteration or vagueness or gendering that is at the base of many languages. Things got more complex after the Norman conquest.
I’ve run games like this, even going so far as having Common as a pidgin tongue that would mark you as a foreigner and wasn’t used in polite circles in one homebrew setting.
But I have come to realize that I dislike players getting excluded from roleplay by languages choices, especially for extended periods of real time when the party is in a land where they don’t all speak. So for a setting with slightly less verisimilitude but much more playability just about everything that you can commonly mean will speak Common, and languages are a bonus – oh, they are more likely to listen to you in their native tongue, or you can read the ancient tome – not something needed to communicate regularly.