How to deal with Racial Languages across an entire world?

[heavyfuel]

So, Dwarves speak Dwarven and Common, according to the PHB. But, do all Dwarves do so? If you then travel 1000 miles, reach lands before unknown to your people, do the Dwarves there also speak Dwarven? Unlikely.

As DMs, how do you deal with these languages across continents? Specifically, do you make languages based on location (much like the real world); does every location have its own subset of racial languages; or do you just handwave this issue?

[ExLibrisMortis]

On a planet like Earth, a language like Common doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Maybe the internet will change that, but English is still a way off being as common as, well, Common (despite alread being the de facto lingua franca of the world).

In a relatively open D&D world (Eberron, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, but maybe not Ravenloft), there are additional vectors along which a language can spread, despite geographical obstacles, and where the language can be more or less preserved in an archaic form. That is, everybody summons (and worships) from the same pool of immortal angels, devils, elementals (and deities), and so on, who continue to remember Common, even if it died out at some point at some place on the Material Plane.

I would expect the communities on the Material to have roughly three scales of language (not every community will have separate languages for all of them): the local language, like a Dwarven dialect for a dwarf city; the local trade language, like Terran for neutral-ish dwarves, gnomes, giants, goliath, and other earth-summoning communities, and a global/multiplanar trade language, like Celestial, Infernal, possibly Draconic, or, indeed, Common. Scripture would be an important vector for spreading racial languages, as most species have their own gods.

The local language would be one that sprang up naturally, has a lot of typical words, but still follows the same grammatical pattern as other languages of that species, based on the scripture of the species-specific deities.

The local lingua franca is based on the political and mercantile orientation in the Great Wheel. For dwarves, I'd suggest the Plane of Earth, and the Seven Heavens, on account of Moradin's alignment. Either Celestial or Terran will do.

The global lingua franca is for talking to devils and so on - you don't like them, you don't align yourself with them, but they are around, and you can't afford not talking to them. This is not the sort of language you'd expect commoners to speak, but mid-high level officials would.

Common may be considered the True Neutral equivalent of Celestial and Infernal. While in principle of the same status and power, its power is fundamentally neutral, just like the Material Plane is mildly neutral-aligned. The unassuming name is simply another expression of that.

[Necroticplague]

I don't. While having many different dialects and languages based on distance is more realistic, it tends to either be irrelevant to any story I use DnD to tell, or outright get in the way of it. Languages are an abstraction, just like HP, AC, all attributes, skills, class levels, and pretty much any other mechanical peice is heavily abstracted.

[Rainshine]

Most of the time I handwave it, yeah. I've seen for existing worlds lists of local dialects, but most of the time it's No one speaks Gnoll, so no one understands the shouted battle plans sort of thing. Although, now that makes me want to make dialects a big thing in a created world, and if the players don't have know the language, they have to find an interpreter and have things happen there. And magic wouldn't just fix it either -- tongues/whatever would let them speak the tongue, but in a very technical, Google translate kind of way, leading to even more issues. You've given me ideas...

In Pathfinder, there's the Linguistics skill, that I had one character I played who maxed it (And had some trait to make it even more ridiculous), and even by level 10, still didn't know all the listed languages yet. None of which mattered, because because someone got permanent tongues.

[Âmesang]

I imagine in the case of some demihuman races they're people live so much longer and have more stable traditions than humans, so one might expect Dwarven being the same between two clans of far-off dwarvenkind due to a purposeful desire to keep it so; on the other hand even changes to their tongues appear now and then, such as WORLD OF GREYHAWK'S® Lendorian Elven being wholly different from regular Elven (though the former may owe its existence to divine intervention).

…speaking of which, I've noticed that in a number of published settings the Common tongue all originate from bits and pieces of older languages coming together (not unlike Modern English), but how do they compare with each other? Are the Common tongues of Oerth, Toril, Krynn, and Eberron all exactly alike due to sheer coincidence, or do they differ from each other? Did Khelben "Blackstaff" Arunsun learn Oerthen Common so as to correspond with Mordenkainen (and, he, Torillian Common)?, or do such powerful personages merely rely on comprehend languages? (The latter would likely explain the ease of communication in "The Wizards Three" series of stories.)

[Elder_Basilisk]

I think credibility depends upon the racial language in question and why the particular race has a language. Historically, some languages have held together remarkably consistently despite lack of printed documents, mass media, or a governing authority and large distances. Latin (both ancient and Medieval) and greek come to mind--the pope in Italy and bishops of Scandianavia both understood Latin and Greek was understood throughout the Roman empire from Persia to England but there may well be other examples. IIRC, written chinese is understood and used in several nations that have their own spoken languages.

For elven and dwarven it makes a certain amount of sense for there to be one racial language even if the particular enclaves are a long ways apart:
A. Both races are long-lived. This should slow the pace of linguistic change since speakers of what would be "the old" language in human terms will still be alive.
B. Both races are, in most settings canon, given to small family sizes. Especially in combination with their long lives, this should act to prevent the formation of a youth culture which is supposedly one of the prime locations for linguistic ferment.
C. In most setting canon, dwarves are said to be highly traditional which would also tend to mitigate any linguistic drift.
D. Despite their chaotic alignment (which I maintain is legacy based on the treatment of fae in Poul Anderson's Broken Sword, and Three Hearts and Three Lions, etc), elves are usually depicted as highly traditional in canon with a very static way of life. This is also consistent with minimal linguistic drift.
E. Elves are depicted as highly magical which will often enable continual contact between distant communities, especially when their long lives are taken into consideration. 1000 miles is not much of an obstacle to teleport or shadow-walk and even regular contact between the elites of various sundered elven communities might be sufficient to minimize linguistic drift.
F. Both elves and dwarves are typically depicted as having relatively harmonious relations with each other. There are tensions (for example between Valley elves and other elves in Greyhawk) but there is little setting lore indicating wars between different groups of elves except between surface elves and drow (who do have their own respective languages).

On the other hand, I don't think a single orcish language makes sense in most settings.
A. Orcs are generally depicted as being short-lived. This should accelerate linguistic drift.
B. In most settings relationships between orc tribes are characterized as hostile. This should also accelerate linguistic drift since borders are one of the important reasons that human dialects develop.
C. Orcs are not usually depicted as being under a single authority, traveling widely (except to raid), or interacting with outsiders (except in conquest or defeat). This does not indicate the kind of contact that would help keep the language static and unified.
D. The way of life orcs are portrayed as living will generally lead to frequent dieoff of older generations in wars and feuds and their subsequent replacement by a younger generation of orcs who mostly grow up together. This seems to create prime circumstances for linguistic drift.

Halflings and gnomes don't have the same kind of consistent canon depictions, but I would see halflings as unlikely candidates for a single unified language while gnomes probably could have one for most of the same reasons that it makes sense for dwarves or elves.

[Thurbane]

COmmon is pretty much what Esperanto hoped it would be.

[Jay R]

I have been in a telecom department staffed with people from America, China, Japan, India, Canada, Bengal, Mexico, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and a couple of others I can't recall. We all spoke English, and we could understand each other.

Usually.

It's still English. I have no problem with the idea of a language of Common (except that it wouldn't be called that).

But just because it's in Common doesn't mean that it's easy to understand, and somebody's accent might give you information about where they are from.

Similarly, if a northern Dwarf meets a southern Dwarf, they can probably understand each other, but they still sound foreign to each other.

[VoxRationis]

I say that "Common" is simply the language of whatever large, culturally influential human culture was relevant to the game setting. Most of my settings are within the milieu of a single such culture, so Common makes more sense. For example, in my pseudo-Roman setting, Latin takes the place of common, and all non-Roman humans treat languages the way elves, for instance, do: they know Latin and the language particular to their ethnic group.

However, I recognize that there is a much larger world beyond that setting, and Latin wouldn't apply to the rest of the world. Heck, in the rest of the world, there is no lingua franca, because the other large, hegemonic culture makes liberal use of tongues effects to communicate with its vassals—its own language remains in exclusive use by its relatively small population. It is just that the scope of the campaign is unlikely to ever result in travel beyond the area where Latin is useful.

Whether I give the nonhuman races special treatment with regards to language varies. In the pseudo-Roman campaign setting, the halflings all pretty much come from one region, and speak one language (with different mutually intelligible dialects that aren't particularly important from a player's perspective). This is also true of the elves, whose population has remained small and in one contiguous area of settlement. However, it is not true of the dwarves, whose cultures have been in largely separate "islands" of habitable area underground. In another campaign, however, the dwarves and elves and gnomes are all linguistically fragmented, and Modern High Elven, for instance, is not compatible with Epenthai Wood Elven. This is because in that setting the elves have been developing separate cultures for 6000 years, which is enough for even elves to change their manners of speech considerably.

[BWR]

All this talk about Common and racial languages in relation to a single planet but blithe acceptance of entire planes having a single tongue. Weird.


Being somewhat of a language nerd I detest the simplified languages presented in the PHB. I can see why they did it that way, which is primarily because when writing a set of mostly generic rules you want things to be pretty damn simple and generic. A good setting makes an effort to create actual languages for areas and make notes about dialects. FR, Mystara, DL have all done so. Probably others I don't remember at present.

Like others here I don't have a problem with Common or racial languages as such but there has to be a reason for it. In Mystara, 'Common' is merely what you call the closest thing to a lingua franca in the area. There are several 'Commons' and it's important to note what the actual language you are speaking when you write 'common' on your character sheet. The reason the Commons are Common is because they are, well, common. There is a cultural/political/economic basis for it, not just a world-building fiat. People make an effort to learn the languages of other powerful socio-economic entities because it's nice to know. Comparisons to modern-day English are fairly valid: people all over the world speak it but not a lot have it as a native language. It is spoken because of the immense power English speaking countries have had politically, culturally and economically in the last couple hundred years, yet there are places where other languages function more as a Common.
As for Latin, there is a distinct difference between Medieval/Church Latin and Classical Latin (so I'm told) and knowing the former does not automatically mean you understand everything of the latter.

In the case of racial languages being the same, well, in my games it depends on the history of the cultures. If one race is very long-lived, the chances are a language isn't going to change much over the years. In a 1000 year period, human languages can change quite drastically to the point where the 'same' language in a single area is most likely incomprehensible to speakers at either end of the period. But elves...well, 1000 years is more like two maybe three generations so a language is probably not going to change as much as it would among humans. Take races which are generally portrayed as very conservative and reluctant to change, like dwarves, and the chances of linguistic drift is again quite a bit less than among humans. Whether or not all elves/dwarves/whatever spoke a single racial language in antiquity is another question, and whether or not they kept it when moving around is yet another.

In any case, I always make a note of how well the PCs understand who they are talking to. You may have the same language on paper but that doesn't mean it is spoken the same way everywhere. Pronunciations can vary drastically even if all the words and grammar are the same (and then you get into errors because of native language poisoning). Or as is the case in Scandinavia, you have officially three different languages but which are similar enough that with a little exposure and effort a speaker of one can understand all just fine (except Danish. No one understands Danish (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk)), so should be considered a single language mechanically. Also, simply because there are different languages involved doesn't mean you can't have some basic communication between people: if you know English and Norwegian with a smattering of German you can actually get quite a bit of Dutch (I imagine that knowing German and English properly works even better).

In short, languages are complicated things and in my games it is a factor. Monolithic racial languages, planar languages and Common simply do not exist.

[Florian]

So, Dwarves speak Dwarven and Common, according to the PHB. But, do all Dwarves do so? If you then travel 1000 miles, reach lands before unknown to your people, do the Dwarves there also speak Dwarven? Unlikely.

As DMs, how do you deal with these languages across continents? Specifically, do you make languages based on location (much like the real world); does every location have its own subset of racial languages; or do you just handwave this issue?

Half the world speaks Chinese, so where´s the matter?

[VoxRationis]

Half the world speaks Chinese, so where´s the matter?

Aside from the fact that 1/2 is an exaggerated number, which Chinese? Only through the efforts of the modern Chinese state has Mandarin even come close to the dominance it has today, and even that is incomplete even within China. Countless dialects, often mutually unintelligible with Mandarin (on the spoken level, the written level, or both), exist.

Plus, even if 1/2 were an accurate number, that's still a 50% chance that a random human won't understand Chinese, which is much higher than you typically get with Dwarven.

[ExLibrisMortis]

Half the world speaks Chinese, so where´s the matter?
About 1 billion people speak Mandarin (natively or as second language), so that's about 15% of the world (not all varieties of Mandarin may be mutually intelligible, not sure on the variety). The remaining groups of Sinitic (Chinese) languages have a few hundred million speakers together, for a total of about 1.4 billion (20% or so). In contrast, only about 400 million or so people speak English natively, but another billion or so speak it as second or foreign language. Then there's Spanish, Hindi, Arabic etc. for a few hundred million each.

Overall, no language in the world is as common as Common. I would say that English is the closest in function to Common, because you can use it in an awful lot of places, but you have to keep in mind that that's mostly in bigger cities and places that expect foreign visitors from many different locations.

[Flickerdart]

If you then travel 1000 miles, reach lands before unknown to your people, do the Dwarves there also speak Dwarven? Unlikely.
Why is it unlikely? Those dwarves got there somehow. It doesn't take an exceptionally long time for a tribe to split away and migrate (following migrating herds or birds, for example), certainly not long enough for linguistic drift to become a problem.

If they migrate a mere 10 miles a year, they'll get over there in a century. Let's say they live there for another century. Is 200 years a lot of time for languages? Frankenstein came out in 1818, and is perfectly readable. Hell, Romeo and Juliet, a 400 year old play, is still not in a different language. If Shakespeare suddenly showed up on your doorstep, he'd sound like an idiot, but you'd be able to understand him.

Of course, all bets are off if you've caught the fantasy writer bug and your civilizations all go back ten thousand years. But then realism is the least of your concerns.

[Elder_Basilisk]

Also, simply because there are different languages involved doesn't mean you can't have some basic communication between people: if you know English and Norwegian with a smattering of German you can actually get quite a bit of Dutch (I imagine that knowing German and English properly works even better).

I could read billboards and some headlines once I got use to Dutch spelling but even speaking English and German I could never make much of spoken Dutch. Then again, pretty much everyone spoke English and because of where I was working at the time, most of my interactions were with foreigners of one stripe or another so I didn't have to try too hard.

[VoxRationis]

Why is it unlikely? Those dwarves got there somehow. It doesn't take an exceptionally long time for a tribe to split away and migrate (following migrating herds or birds, for example), certainly not long enough for linguistic drift to become a problem.

If they migrate a mere 10 miles a year, they'll get over there in a century. Let's say they live there for another century. Is 200 years a lot of time for languages? Frankenstein came out in 1818, and is perfectly readable. Hell, Romeo and Juliet, a 400 year old play, is still not in a different language. If Shakespeare suddenly showed up on your doorstep, he'd sound like an idiot, but you'd be able to understand him.

Of course, all bets are off if you've caught the fantasy writer bug and your civilizations all go back ten thousand years. But then realism is the least of your concerns.

Sure, if the only dwarves in the setting migrated from the dwarven homeland during the history of a continuous dwarven civilization, following an impetus through deserted territory. But realistically, looking just at the endpoint, if you draw a 1000 mile radius from the origin of a culture (such as the Yellow River), how many people at the edge of that circle will speak the language spoken at the center? If you go back 500 years in our history, before industrialization and the greatest extent of the European empires, this becomes even more true.

It's quite possible that dwarven civilizations have been separate from one another for all of recorded history, having independently arisen after population splits long before the development of writing, kings, formal religions, or anything modern dwarves take for granted. It's also possible that migrations and cross-contact with other cultures have altered the language once held in common by two regions of dwarven settlement until they can no longer communicate with their modern vernaculars. This latter process can work in less than a thousand years.

[Agincourt]

I agree that it is not realistic to have entire races speak the same language, especially when considering geographical borders of oceans, mountain ranges, or deserts. However, I haven't scrapped the language system because I don't know think the complexity would justify all the added work. Likewise, I don't think a gold piece should have universal value, but creating a new currency for every civilization in my campaign just isn't a practical use of my time.

I think if a DM had the time to go through and decide a language and dialect for every nation and town, respectively, it would add to the verisimilitude of the world. But it would not add much else. Players would just cast the appropriate spells or they would buy Pearls of Speech (MIC 118).

It would not add compelling story lines. For maybe one game session it would be interesting to try to talk to the foreigner with valuable information. After that it would wear very thin. Very quickly the players would be saying, "DM, if you want us to have this information give it to us. Otherwise don't. Can we skip the part where we ask the foreigner to repeat himself three times?"

[Florian]

What I wanted to showcase with "50% speak Chinese" is that neither, racial languages nor common are everyday languages. They are the common roots of the languages and dialects that people in a region speak and enable common communication on a basic level, nothing more.
(Like me as a german understanding the basic grammar and syntax of most latin-based languages)

Blame the Realms for a smattering of human (sub)languages with no similar (sub)languages for other races. Stupid humanozentric designers.

[Honest Tiefling]

Fantasy worlds have magic which could lead to a more homogenized language. Do you think the Dwarf God wants to waste the time of his divine minions learning different dialects when they could be slaying giants!? No! Therefore, his minions would have a reason to standardize the language and minimize regional variances. Given that they are probably summoned or talked to frequently enough, this could be enough to stop anything more then slight dialects appearing.

[2D8HP]

IRL I work with a lot of immigrants. Some of them can be a bit hard for me to understand, but I often have a much harder time understanding what people are trying to say when they have a different U.S. regional accent instead. For example I had a welding class with two instructors, one who emigrated from Romania (the European Nation) and the other I think came from Georgia (the U.S. state not the former Soviet republic). Of the two I could definitely understand the foreign born instructor better! Onthe first day the U.S. born instructor started class by saying, "OK fellas, and by fellas I also mean you ladies", and those were the very last words of his I understood!
So no "common" is not realistic at all, I think Tolkien had "the common tongue" in the LotR to be a stand in for Old English/Anglo Saxon, while he had Finnish and Welsh based Elvis language's. And maybe "common" also represented the difference in languages in Medieval England, with "commoners" speaking English (or Cornish); the Aristocracy speaking Norman French, and the educated speaking Latin?
But maybe "common" does have some validity (teleportation circles?) in that there seems to be posts from playgrounders from other nations whose written English is better than mine!

[Gildedragon]

Fantasy worlds have magic which could lead to a more homogenized language. Do you think the Dwarf God wants to waste the time of his divine minions learning different dialects when they could be slaying giants!? No! Therefore, his minions would have a reason to standardize the language and minimize regional variances. Given that they are probably summoned or talked to frequently enough, this could be enough to stop anything more then slight dialects appearing.

This is an interesting idea. Language in D&D might be a lot more stable with the existence of deities that did indeed first teach language to the peoples of the of the world (or just to their chosen ones) and there's also the language of creation which is the ur-language from which reality was created from, and is probably the parent language of all other languages. And with said language having a physical effect on the world by its sound, maybe words can't drift too far away from their original sound without losing something. Maybe they'd stop being able to conjure up the mental image of their signified, they'd cease to be useful symbols, and thus the new versions would not come into popular use.
One could assume that by the time of campaign the languages have drifted as far away as they can from truespeach (while remaining meaningful), and thus can't change any more.

------

However if one wanted a greater variety of 'languages' I saw an idea for "pidgins" where one has a list of several root languages (let's say the phb ones; change common to human) and local languages are a combination of roots (celestial, human, and elvish in a theocratic half-elven city state; draconic and terran for a settlement derived from kobolds that lived in caverns until teluric movements forced an exodus); to speak the language well you need to know the roots, and knowing some gives partial understanding, investing a point in that particular language (the celestial-human-elf, for example) makes you speak it exceptionally (give a bonus to all language-y checks made).
Though I'd make Speak Language be... Easier to boost (lessons; staying in an area; etc... All acquireable with gold and giving bonus skillpoints to be spent on specific languages or on roots)

[Knaight]

Languages follow history, and who speaks what where is a problem that can be traced back. Just take real life, where you have tightly packed areas with a number of mutually unintelligible languages (look at SE Asia), and then you have languages which show up in areas separated by thousands of miles (Spanish, Arabic). The same thing applies when looking at non human languages. If those dwarven holds 1000 miles apart are an old one and its new colony, they probably speak the same language. There are likely some changes, particularly when it comes to adapting terms from local languages for things which don't have a term in the old language, in making names*, etc. Still, I'd expect similarities. Two areas with limited contact which diverged ages ago, even if they are pretty close? They likely have less to do with each other.

With that said, when it comes to linguistic drift it's probably more useful to think in generational terms than in per year, and that has big implications for a fantasy setting with distinct species that have meaningfully different lifespans. Elves in particular are major here, a 500 year old dialect is likely to stick around much better when some of the people who learned it 500 years ago are still alive to speak it, so just having Elvish is pretty viable. Then there's the matter of long term literacy, and what can be done with that - the typical portrayals of Dwarven culture represent them as very traditionalist, so it would be entirely possible for there to only be one written Dwarven, with an abundance of mutually unintelligible spoken dialects.

This also lets you create fun edge cases. For instance, say there was a human culture which was embedded among elves until 1000 years ago, and forced to use Elvish. 1000 years ago, the language was the same for both people. 3 generations of elves later, it's pretty much the same language as it used to be. 50 generations of humans later, not so much, leaving them with what is definitely a dialect of Elvish, that has absolutely no elves as native speakers.

*The U.S. is actually a pretty good example of this. English is by far the most spoken language, but there are a lot of names that pull from native american sources, which is why the names are often so drastically different than in Britain. You're not going to get a town named Cheyenne, or Pueblo, or Durango. Just look at this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_place_names_in_the_United_States_of_Native _American_origin) list, which is fairly lengthy despite being ridiculously incomplete.

[Honest Tiefling]

America is also home to names derived from Spanish and Greek, so they also stole from old languages. Actually, many names were wholeheartedly stolen from Britain, such as when they decided to rename New Asterdam...And let's not forget the stunning example of Vacaville, or the town where they just gave up.

And one important fact you didn't mention is that areas with tons of languages are mostly due to warfare, in that a huge force shoved a bunch of people together who really didn't get along and often warred with each other. So mapping out wars and forced migrations of people would be the first step to decide where areas of linguistic density should be.

[Knaight]

And one important fact you didn't mention is that areas with tons of languages are mostly due to warfare, in that a huge force shoved a bunch of people together who really didn't get along and often warred with each other. So mapping out wars and forced migrations of people would be the first step to decide where areas of linguistic density should be.

That fits under the broader umbrella of language following history, but it's a particularly important example. There are a lot of historical examples where one culture starts taking a bunch of territory, the ones on the outskirts move away and conquer territory as they move, those get pushed, and eventually you get to an ocean or mountain range or something and a bunch of cultures are squished together, putting a lot of different languages in a small area. These are also breeding grounds for new dialects and eventually new languages.