pigeonstalking:

waitingforturnips:

pigeonstalking:

thequantumwritings:

Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.

On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.

In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.

In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.

Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.

Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.

I definitely recommend that anybody interested in worldbuilding of this sort do some research into some foundational linguistics, especially on the issue of language contact! It’s really interesting stuff, and could definitely help develop your ideas. Like, I’m coming at this with a fairly undeveloped set of ideas based on studies in contact linguistics I did quite a while ago, and even though they’re probably a bit outdated or rudimentary, it’s still suggesting a much messier and even more interesting set of problems you could play with.

Here’s an issue you’ll face: many trade pidgins are not easily usable outside of the domain of trade, and thus wouldn’t be useable as a base of communication along more developed lines. However, some do expand beyond their original purpose. Based on a cursory search, I’ve found at least a couple known trade pidgins that might serve as semi-models for what you’re looking at. Historically, there was Chinese Pidgin Russian, and another is Ndyuka-Trio Pidgin. 

You could come up with a lot of interesting questions as you develop a more interesting idea of Common. How early do children learn it? Do they learn it young enough to make them effectively bi- or multilingual?  Pidgins, by their usual formal definition, don’t technically have native speakers, and often really are only used for contact between groups in trade, work, or other situations, and thus largely limited to the situations they’ve been cobbled together in. If you want a language that has been used around children who then pick it up and form a new language, which is formally called a creole. This will begin to show its own grammatical characteristics, as the children take your “mishmash” and develop it into a language of its own. 

However, at this point individual communities would probably have their own creoles developing individually, since dwarf kids aren’t going to be sharing notes (figuratively) with elf kids and so on, and that could mean that instead of one Common, you’re developing a lot of local creoles. Or does a creole form in one community and get picked up elsewhere as the new Common? If so, which community “decides” the Common tongue?

Alternatively, you might want to stick to a pidgin, which means that it would probably be a formally reduced linguistic variety that was learned closer to adulthood, and used only by, say, traders, travelers, and others who expect to be in contact with other communities. Folks who stay in their own communities would likely know very little Common, which leads you to another interesting pressure to play with. (What happens if somebody gets thrown into an adventure who never expected to leave home? How much Common would they plausibly know?)

Your pidgin will also hit conversational walls whenever there isn’t a term or phrasing that has been formally introduced into the trade language, so it will be harder to use for new, complex ideas, or ideas you might not have learned about at Trader College.

Also, the idea that the pidgin is somehow an even mix of all of the communities suggests a weirdly even level of trade between them all. It’s much more common, in the world, for pidgins to arise in much more specific trading contexts. For example, say you have Tolkienesque standoffish elves? In that case, maybe dwarves and humans trade much more often with each other than with elves, so they form a pidgin, and any elves curious about making new friends have to learn Human Pidgin Dwarvish or whatever – not because of an imperialist background but because that’s what they’ve got.

In any case, I’d recommend researching this kind of thing just as you would research anything else in your world. Language is at the center of all kinds of complex social interactions, and there’s a reason it’s often easier to fall back on the boring old imperialist language model. But, by the same token, by building your common language around the structure of the world and vice versa, the language can end up becoming a very interesting mirror of the sorts of social interactions you’ve got going on.

I just wanted to hop in and add that pidgins can travel far from where they originated. For example, the Melanesian creoles Bislama (Vanuatu), Tok Pisin (PNG) and Pijin (Solomon Islands) all have roots in the pidgin that developed in Sydney (a pidgin of English and the local Aboriginal languages) during the initial decades of Australian colonisation. 

So you could definitely have a situation where a pidgin develops (or creolises) in one community and is then adopted by people from a totally different country/race/language group, thereby creating a new “common” language (or closely-related languages). 

Other things to consider:

• High levels of borrowing leading to convergence of vocabularies while maintaining grammatical differences (eg two different languages with lots of shared words)
• High levels of language contact leading to convergence of grammars while maintaining different vocabularies (eg two different languages with different vocabularies but similar grammar, therefore easy to learn)
• A dead or archaic language used as a lingua franca (eg Latin in Medieval Europe, Sumerian & Akkadian in ancient Mesopotamia)
• High levels of multilingualism (thereby doing away with the concept of a “common” language), which may involve code-switching between different languages as a default conversational practice (which, in rare cases, can fossilise and be acquired by children as a “mixed” language)

I was also wondering about this situation:

Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.

Because I don’t think this would actually happen? Children seem naturally inclined to regularise languages, so when children creolise a pidgin or develop a mixed language as their first language, they regularise rules and apply them across the board (this is one of the reasons why people claim that creoles are “simplified” languages, because they don’t generally include the same kind of grammatical irregularities as other natural languages).

Plus grammar tends towards being modular in contact languages. For example, you can get a mixed language where the verbal morphology comes from one language and the nominal morphology comes from another language, but you don’t usually get a language where some verbs conjugate according to one language and some verbs conjugate according to another language. Yes, languages can acquire morphology from other languages through language contact, like English borrowing French and Latin nouns with their French and Latin plurals, but these borrowed plurals don’t become productive (ie you can’t add them to other words, they come attached with their host noun). So basically, while mixed languages can contain grammatical systems from multiple languages, the systems themselves are preserved intact and not mixed up together.

And I can’t imagine a language where some adjectives come before the noun and some come after (due on language contact). I mean, maybe it could happen?? But I’ve never come across that kind of syntactic mishmash in a contact language before. You would expect that a creole or mixed language would adopt one syntactic strategy from one language (though it may also adopt a different syntactic strategy from a different language in another part of its grammar).

Basically: contact languages are very well organised, with different modules of grammar slotting in together in ways that (generally) make sense according to the original grammars. It isn’t just some kind of free for all where all the rules get mixed up!

Aaaa thank you so much Claire!! I agree with your instinct about the “mishmash” thing, but you’ve worked a lot more on contact language-related stuff, so your contribution is much appreciated.

To the adjective-before/after-noun thing – well, iirc we’ve got a few fossilized examples in English from French contact? But I agree, I’m not sure it would happen except in the case of extremely fixed expressions.