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.

ALSO, Common that isn’t the HUMAN’S language. 

Trolls have been here before plants even existed, much less biological life. Everyone accepts theirs as the True Language, and use it for cross cultural communication, even though the Trolls have almost all turned into mountains and nobody uses it as a first language. Many newer concepts don’t have Trollish translations, so creatures have to construct awkward compounds to describe them. (Somewhat similar to medieval Latin.)

Or, the Fae conquered most of the known world, and were only recently ousted. Everyone hates and fears them, but government and commerce are still conducted in Fairy Speech because no one can agree on which language to use and everyone knows it. (Kind of like the Hellenistic Era, where everyone spoke Greek after Alexander the Great’s empire fell apart.)

The Elves created writing (and, according to them, everything else) and all other races use some form of their creation. For a long time, to write you had to be able to speak Elvish. The script has now been adapted to other languages, but enough Elvish has crept into other tongues that it’s the easiest second language for most creatures to learn. (Like Chinese or Latin for long periods of history.)

Or YES, the contact languages that OP is talking about! Ranging from dialects to pidgins to creoles.

Take any of the above ideas, and add loanwords from all the first languages of speakers. 

Maybe Elvish communities grew up in other cultural spheres and their language evolved. Now races are learning Elvish with strong accents, and lots of archaisms and foreign loanwords. (Like Cajun and Quebecois French.)

Maybe Common evolved in stages. First from the Trolls, then the Dwarves with their tools and society, the Merfolk with animal husbandry and cultural hierarchy, the Humans with farming and cooking, the Werecreatures with magic, etc. Layers of language, with the earliest vocabulary no longer similar to modern Dwarvish or Aquatic, the newest adoptions still pronounced with “quotation marks” by older speakers. (Like modern English, with French loanwords the French can’t recognize and new identity terms the previous generation won’t accept.)

Maybe instead of Common being the language of the educated (like Latin and Chinese were), Common is the domain of the lower classes. If you have the means, you learn your cultural tongue, but the poor all speak Fairy Speech. Other languages were mostly erased, and the struggle to revive them was an expression of pride and freedom. Many rich children no longer understand Fairy Speech, though their parents probably do. (Like innumerable endangered languages these days are trying for. Lets create worlds where they’ve mostly succeeded!)

Maybe there are areas that are multicultural enough that Common is the general language of speech. You can always recognize them because of their dialect. Second language Common speakers usually speak textbook Common, bloodless and inoffensive, with a well designed grammar that takes the best of all its component languages. People who speak it from birth have wildly varying grammar, depending on the most influential cultures in their neighbourhood. Genders vary from 0 to 4. Affixes are mostly the same, but can be added in different orders and either before or after the root. Word order is a disaster, and often new word endings have to be created just so you know who’s the object of the sentence, because in Tevinter they put the object at the beginning?

Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!