Racial Vs Regional Languages

[ZeroGear]

Language is an interesting factor in almost every roleplaying game. While it is almost always assumed that everyone speaks the common language (or that alt least civilized people do) most races still have their own language.
But what it language was not simply divided between races, but instead divided amongst countries?
Assume for a moment that we discard all prior language rules in the game. What if each nation or state had a language that evolved from combinations of racial languages form inhabitants that lived their? What if a single racial language was dominant in a specific state while a different one was common in the neighboring country? What if bonus languages were not based on your species, but on your birthplace? How would that change the dynamic of language use in the game?

This is assuming that there is a trade language (common) and that this is set in a fantasy world.
It is also assuming that some sub-languages or feral languages still exist, but are in the minority.

What do you guys think?

[BootStrapTommy]

This is the case to a mild degree in the Faerun campaign setting.

For example, each human sub-race has a regional language. As to most the campaign settings sub-races. You can also have chosen languages from these regional languages assuming you somehow have some geographic experience with that region.

[Craft (Cheese)]

Language nerd perspective: Honestly, one language per country is still far too unrealistic for me. Much better for each country to have (or have once had) hundreds of minority languages with different historical, official, and prestige statuses, complicated substrata and creolization patterns, and fuzzy, interweaving phylums, dialect boundaries, regional variations, and areal phenomenae obscuring genetic relations. After all the average language here on earth is spoken by a few hundred people at most and languages die out on a weekly basis.


Roleplayer perspective: To be honest, I actually kinda think the 3.5 language rules are actually too complicated as they stand, from a gameplay perspective. It's pretty rare for non-contrived situations to appear where anyone speaks something other than Common, and I've not once in my life ever seen a situation in a roleplaying game where more than two languages are being spoken where the DM (whether myself or someone else) did not specifically set up the scenario to get this result. Furthermore your languages are almost never a meaningful choice: At best they're a minor piece of background fluff (not that mechanizing minor pieces of background fluff is a bad thing, there's just much better ways to do this than through rules that determine which languages you speak) and at worst they're something you just pick at random because your INT score is insanely high and you have more langs than you know what to sensibly do with.

Furthermore, the "Oh no, you need to find a way to speak and/or understand Language X!" puzzle is fun and interesting... once in a great while. If you approached language with anything close to realism then any PCs who aren't perfectly stationary (and even many who are if they're in a sufficiently metropolitan area) will be encountering this puzzle several times per session, and it gets old pretty damned fast. Sweeping the language issue under the rug and just using Common everywhere is a worthy sacrifice of verisimilitude for the purposes of cutting to the interesting bits, because, honestly, nobody but a language nerd like myself finds this sort of thing interesting.

[BootStrapTommy]

Language nerd perspective: Honestly, one language per country is still far too unrealistic for me. Much better for each country to have (or have once had) hundreds of minority languages with different historical, official, and prestige statuses, complicated substrata and creolization patterns, and fuzzy, interweaving phylums, dialect boundaries, regional variations, and areal phenomenae obscuring genetic relations. After all the average language here on earth is spoken by a few hundred people at most and languages die out on a weekly basis.
Faerun campaign setting, languages are based on ethnic group, with each ethic group having a number of "possible" languages. Language makes more sense to be split by ethic group and not country. If you use Faerun, there is plenty of language problems.

Roleplayer perspective: To be honest, I actually kinda think the 3.5 language rules are actually too complicated as they stand, from a gameplay perspective. It's pretty rare for non-contrived situations to appear where anyone speaks something other than Common, and I've not once in my life ever seen a situation in a roleplaying game where more than two languages are being spoken where the DM (whether myself or someone else) did not specifically set up the scenario to get this result. Furthermore your languages are almost never a meaningful choice: At best they're a minor piece of background fluff (not that mechanizing minor pieces of background fluff is a bad thing, there's just much better ways to do this than through rules that determine which languages you speak) and at worst they're something you just pick at random because your INT score is insanely high and you have more langs than you know what to sensibly do with.
You are clearly doing it wrong. Either that or you never play without someone who knows Draconic. Or Infernal. Or Abyssmal. Or Goblin. Or Orc, etc. Not every campaign will have a speaker for all of those, yet most campaigns will likely have a monster who only speaks one of those.

Furthermore, you've clearly never been in a situation where players need to pass information from one to the other without others present understanding it.

[Craft (Cheese)]

Faerun campaign setting, languages are based on ethnic group, with each ethic group having a number of "possible" languages. Language makes more sense to be split by ethic group and not country. If you use Faerun, there is plenty of language problems.

Not even close. If you can't have an in-character debate on the equivalents of the Glottalic Theory or the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis, your setting's language situation isn't realistic enough.


You are clearly doing it wrong.

Potentially.


Not every campaign will have a speaker for all of those, yet most campaigns will likely have a monster who only speaks one of those.

A monster who only speaks one of those... that the players are interested in talking to. Doesn't seem all that common to me, and when it does come up trivial magical solutions are available.


Furthermore, you've clearly never been in a situation where players need to pass information from one to the other without others present understanding it.

It happens all the time, but when it does there's generally better methods available than speaking in a different language right in front of them, as doing so both gives the fact that a communication is taking place at all away (which very often defeats the entire point of keeping the communication a secret) and there's always the risk that the relevant party actually understands what you're saying after all. There are trivial means, both magical and non-magical, that do not present these risks.

[yougi]

I personally tried regional languages in my current setting as the PCs would have to go around the campaign world, and to be honest, I just CAN'T WAIT to get back to the racial ones.

I personally did not put a "Common" tongue, and instead decided that since every PC was from the same region, they spoke that language as base, put people in other region had average odds of knowing it: even English, the closest thing we have to Common, is not spoken by 1/6 of the people of our modern world, and those numbers are that high largely due to colonialism.

But in game, this led to having the bard learn all languages (because there were so few), and now anytime the party gets split up in town while out of their home nation, trouble happens because the bard is more or less the only polyglot on the team. I had to handwaive it in shopping because in the beginning merchants only dealt with the bard. I believe that while it added (a small amount to be fair) realism, it took away quite a bit of fun.

The campaign I'm planning next will go back to racial languages, without even the slightest bit of regional languages. Maybe by the time I start another large scale game where the PCs go around the world, I'll use both, meaning a different common in each part of the world, and one "real" common, simply for flavor.

[Khedrac]

When the Gazetteers were produced for the D&D known world (i.e. it became Mystara) national languages were introduced (sometimes more than one for countries with a mixture of ethnic areas). "Common" was re-defined as the national language of the local empire (which actually meant there were 2 versions of common just in the main area) and became far from common in the less cosmopolitan countries (i.e. far fewer people would speak it). There is a "Trade" tongue of sorts, but it is really the national language of the merchant country so not actually that widely spoken.
The Hollow World actually has a "Common" that is more widely spoken as it is the base tongue of the primitive people who spread over nearly all the Hollow World before mount cultures were put there by the Immortals.

Glorantha (at least in 3rd Ed AH RQ days) did not have a common tongue, but languages did fall into families giving a chance of comprehensibility. There was a "Trade" tongue - the cult language for the main trading cult - but outside of people with a need to learn it (merchants, adventurers) few people did. Languages were mainly split on geographical/ethnic/religious groups with some isolated pockets being found where people's ancestors had moved taking their speech witht hem.

[SgtCarnage92]

Pathfinder's core setting Golarion has quite a few regional languages that can sometimes cross country borders. I think various regional languages (or at least regional dialects) can add a lot to world building as it can help to differentiate various cultures that cover a world. I'm still currently building my own homebrew setting and while I haven't detailed most of the nation-states...i'm planning on doing regional languages once I figure out the world history.

[Jay R]

Languages change, based on the actions and movements of the people who speak them.

I work on the assumption that it is much harder for a language to change if the people who spoke it 1,000 years ago are still speaking it today. So Elvish is pretty much what it was thousands of years ago. This alone makes it different from most human languages. I assume that human scholars want to learn Elvish, for the same reason many scholars today need to understand Latin, classical Greek, Old High German, etc.

People who isolate themselves tend to have their own language, or at least their own pronunciation. The more isolated they are, the less intelligible it will be to others. I therefore assume that people who live together underground have their own language (dwarves, orcs, etc.)

Groups that get along with their neighbors have at least some people who can communicate with their neighbors. So people near dwarf mines who buy ore or artifacts from dwarves have at least some people who can speak Dwarvish. (And the dwarves have some people who can speak the human languages.) People who live near orc tunnels but only fight orcs don't necessarily speak orcish. Two dwarf clans that haven't interacted in centuries might not be able to understand each other, even if they both speak Dwarvish, just as an Indian from a small village, a Texan from an isolated east Texas town, and somebody from Yorkshire might have trouble communicating, despite the fact that they share the "common" tongue of English.

It's quite possible for a subgroup to maintain its own language while living among another group, as is proven by the number of Spanish-only speakers in Dallas (or by the number of English-only speakers). But the merchants will try to be able to communicate with all possible customers. Soon they might develop a creole of dwarvish, gnome, and the local human tongue, just as a New Orleans creole doesn't speak either French nor English, but a blend.

So I have regional languages and race languages, based on the history of the region and the race. I tend to assume a (mostly) European base, so I assume that Elvish is Old Gaelic, Dwarvish is based on Old Norse, and that all the European languages exist.

[lsfreak]

I work on the assumption that it is much harder for a language to change if the people who spoke it 1,000 years ago are still speaking it today. So Elvish is pretty much what it was thousands of years ago. This alone makes it different from most human languages. I assume that human scholars want to learn Elvish, for the same reason many scholars today need to understand Latin, classical Greek, Old High German, etc.

Interestingly enough, I'm not sure this is true. For humans, parents and children are usually about two generations apart. However, if elves have more generations between parents and children, it's more likely for language to change between a parent's and a children's generation. After all, it's a child's peers that have the greatest influence on their speech patterns, and a child's speech can fairly accurately be described as a minisculely-exaggerated version of the previous generation's speech (not their parent's). If there's five generations between an elf and their children, this gives enough time for the language to evolve that a children speaking to their grandparents won't by any means be incomprehensible, but it might constitute a dialect split along generational lines rather than geographic ones.
(Now, of course, elven generations are probably a lot longer than human generations, so it will still change more slowly. It's just that the slowness wouldn't probably be due to older speakers still living.)

(Further thoughts coming later, I typed up a long thing and realized it wasn't entirely relevant due to a serious case of tiredness).

[Yora]

I personally did not put a "Common" tongue, and instead decided that since every PC was from the same region, they spoke that language as base, put people in other region had average odds of knowing it: even English, the closest thing we have to Common, is not spoken by 1/6 of the people of our modern world, and those numbers are that high largely due to colonialism.
Not everyone needs to be able to speak a common trade language. Two or three people per village are usually enough. If you arrive at a settlement and the guards gesture you to follow them to their leader, who has one advisor who speaks some languages not known by the villagers, I think that adds a lot to the game.

I don't use a universal common language, but usually have three or four that are used in international communication. Like Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Chinese as spoken at the Emperors court. Or in the modern world English, Spanish, French, and Chinese. The chance that someone in a group knows at least one of those languages is very high. In older AD&D books, I think "common" is written in a way that strongly implies "the common language of the area the character is from", and not so much a specific language spoken by everyone in the world.

Interestingly enough, I'm not sure this is true. For humans, parents and children are usually about two generations apart. However, if elves have more generations between parents and children, it's more likely for language to change between a parent's and a children's generation. After all, it's a child's peers that have the greatest influence on their speech patterns, and a child's speech can fairly accurately be described as a minisculely-exaggerated version of the previous generation's speech (not their parent's). If there's five generations between an elf and their children, this gives enough time for the language to evolve that a children speaking to their grandparents won't by any means be incomprehensible, but it might constitute a dialect split along generational lines rather than geographic ones.
I think in practice, all people are fluent in several "modes" of their own language. While young humans can talk in a way that is incomprehensible to their grandparents, and quite often grandparents also can talk in a way that is hard to follow by their grandchildren when they are with friends of similar age, they both have no problem talking with each other because they are fluent in the mainstream "mode" that is independent of age.
I would guess the mainstream language only really changes after the older generations are gone and only such words from the younger peoples language remain in the mainstream that managed to be fashionable for several decades instead of just a couple of years.

[Jay R]

I work on the assumption that it is much harder for a language to change if the people who spoke it 1,000 years ago are still speaking it today. So Elvish is pretty much what it was thousands of years ago. This alone makes it different from most human languages. I assume that human scholars want to learn Elvish, for the same reason many scholars today need to understand Latin, classical Greek, Old High German, etc.

Interestingly enough, I'm not sure this is true. For humans, parents and children are usually about two generations apart. However, if elves have more generations between parents and children, it's more likely for language to change between a parent's and a children's generation. After all, it's a child's peers that have the greatest influence on their speech patterns, and a child's speech can fairly accurately be described as a minisculely-exaggerated version of the previous generation's speech (not their parent's). If there's five generations between an elf and their children, this gives enough time for the language to evolve that a children speaking to their grandparents won't by any means be incomprehensible, but it might constitute a dialect split along generational lines rather than geographic ones.
(Now, of course, elven generations are probably a lot longer than human generations, so it will still change more slowly. It's just that the slowness wouldn't probably be due to older speakers still living.)

(Further thoughts coming later, I typed up a long thing and realized it wasn't entirely relevant due to a serious case of tiredness).

First of all, by definition, parents and children are one generation apart. That's what generation means.

Secondly, I assume that the majority of elves speaking today were speaking it 1,000 years ago. They are still speaking the language they always have, with adjustments for changes in their lifestyle and culture, which is close to stagnant.

[lsfreak]

I would guess the mainstream language only really changes after the older generations are gone and only such words from the younger peoples language remain in the mainstream that managed to be fashionable for several decades instead of just a couple of years.

Once again, I think the presence or absence of older speakers is incidental, and the real issue is your second point - enough time for the language change to be accepted. However, when I say accepted what I really mean is whether or not it's passed on to younger generations, not whether it's mediated between generations. It doesn't really matter that I use "like" less often around my grandparents, because around peers or those younger than me I continue to use it as an exaggeration/estimation marker, and they're the ones that are going to shape the language in the future. (Also it's not just lexical or grammatical things, but phonological changes. Small and doll rhyme for me as "smawl" and "dawl", but not my parents or grandparents who have "smawl" and "dahl", but it's not likely to change for either of us).


This is assuming that there is a trade language (common) and that this is set in a fantasy world.
It is also assuming that some sub-languages or feral languages still exist, but are in the minority.
I dislike the idea of common. Trade languages will be pidgins of only a given two or three languages that are in close contact with each other, or wholesale adoption of a language. Compare what happened in the Roman empire - most people of the empire wouldn't be fluent in Vulgar Latin or Koine Greek, but traders, merchants, etc could have basic conversations in these regularized/standardized dialects (which is another thing people seem to overlook - people are going to have basic understanding of each other's languages if trade depends on it).
Also, feral languages are a misnomer. There's no such thing. While people in-world might consider them feral languages, I don't believe that such a thing would ever actually exist and be appreciably different from any other language.


Language nerd perspective: Honestly, one language per country is still far too unrealistic for me. Much better for each country to have (or have once had) hundreds of minority languages with different historical, official, and prestige statuses, complicated substrata and creolization patterns, and fuzzy, interweaving phylums, dialect boundaries, regional variations, and areal phenomenae obscuring genetic relations. After all the average language here on earth is spoken by a few hundred people at most and languages die out on a weekly basis.
I think you're overdoing it. 30% of languages currently have speakers measured in the thousands, another 25% in the tens of thousands, and roughly equal numbers of languages (13-15%) in the hundreds as in the hundred-thousands. And I think one language per "ruled-area" is pretty realistic, it's just that we're used to thinking in terms of countries, which are the results of empires and their subsequent fracturing. I mean, more recently than the Revolutionary War, Italy was 11 separate states. Pre-Norman invasion, Ireland was 8 kingdoms (an average of roughly 64x64 miles each). Unified England was a merger of seven-ish different kingdoms against the eighth area (Danelaw), and that's not counting Wales or Scotland (75x75 miles average). An empire or fragmented state after an empire falls will certainly have multiple languages under it, but without such a unifying force it's very likely people of a given ethno-linguistic group will form their own small state, possibly with a small number of other languages in conquered or allied areas.


First of all, by definition, parents and children are one generation apart. That's what generation means.

Secondly, I assume that the majority of elves speaking today were speaking it 1,000 years ago. They are still speaking the language they always have, with adjustments for changes in their lifestyle and culture, which is close to stagnant.
First, only in part. There's 30 years between my parents and me, which is enough time for a unique cultural and linguistic generation between us. If elves have enough time between parents and children for five of these cultural/linguistic generations, the differences between a child's and parent's speech will be greater.

On the second part, I was assuming shorter-lived elves, I guess between the standard D&D elf with a maximum age of 750 and Tolkien elves that are immortal (for one thing because of the silly population problems you get if you assume immortal elves, unless you also assume perfect birth control, infanticide, or a hatred of sex). If you have truly immortal elves, then I'm not sure what to make of language change.

-----
I always prefer (ethno-)regional languages as opposed to racial. However, I like smaller areas with lots of detail, as opposed to large areas with broad strokes. Give me the choice of playing all of Europe or the Italian Peninsula, I'll always take the latter. This limits linguistic differences somewhat due to closeness. For my current setting, I've got two major languages and half a dozen smaller ones, with the two major ones being fairly fleshed out.

However, as much as I like languages, I don't think it's fun to incorporate them into games except in specific ways. "We're in a new town, time to find a translator" is just a hassle (worse if it's "I cast tongues"). Instead, the players find an amulet with an inscription and they need to find someone who deals in these artifacts, a map in a dungeon in labelled in an unknown language and the players have to try and figure it out, a ghost speaks to them in a historic form of their language and they must interpret. These are things that are interesting and are part of, or can become their own, adventure. Others are incorporating languages in ways that the players, not the characters, can use and understand, like titles or placenames or greetings.

[Jay R]

First, only in part. There's 30 years between my parents and me, which is enough time for a unique cultural and linguistic generation between us. If elves have enough time between parents and children for five of these cultural/linguistic generations, the differences between a child's and parent's speech will be greater.

First. I wasn't using "generation" in a metaphorical sense, but in the original one. Parents generate children. The childrn grow up and generate grand children. Each of these is a generation.

Secondly, the children are raised by the parents. They learn the parents' language. They learn new words as well, after they start leaving the house, but they begin by learning their parents' language. Therefore the language they speak is close enough to their parents' language that they can speak to their parents.


On the second part, I was assuming shorter-lived elves, I guess between the standard D&D elf with a maximum age of 750 and Tolkien elves that are immortal (for one thing because of the silly population problems you get if you assume immortal elves, unless you also assume perfect birth control, infanticide, or a hatred of sex). If you have truly immortal elves, then I'm not sure what to make of language change.

I assume that elves live close to 2,000 years, and rarely breed. There are far fewer than there used to be, and more humans than there used to be.

[hamlet]

You should check out the Kingdoms of kalamar setting and Atlas for this. They've already done something just like this.

No specific "common" language, but several human languages based on the various aboriginal groups and lots of fiddly dialects. On top of this, there are racial languages for elves, dwarves, goblins, etc. And even some of them have dialects (like the Hobgoblin language family).

It's, in my mind, about the best way language was handled for a game where polyglotted characters were common rather than the exception. Lots of languages so people had a chance to actually use those languages they had, but always a fair to middling chance that nobody in the group actually could speak that dialect and had to either find a translator/common langugae between them, or work out general ideas with some luck, ingenuity, and broad gesturing like tourists.:smallsmile: