D&D General Languages suck in D&D.

Steampunkette said:

Moving the languages into cultures helps, to some degree. At least now everyone raised in the "Deep Dwarf" culture knows common, undercommon, and dwarf...

But what is "Dwarf" as a language except an example of a racial monolith spoken across the dwarf-related cultures?

The VRC cultures all give you "Common, plus another language" or two. Or three. Or whatever. But what are those languages? Dwarf, Elf, Auran, Gnome, Minotaur...

Which are the same across every planet, because no matter how far apart elves are in the galaxy they all speak Elven in the exact same way.

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How would the reverse be better for D&D? Every world having elves who don't speak the same exact way. It would certainly lead to some interesting role-playing. You could have two elven characters from two different elven cultures trying to understand each other. Presumably with a Linguistics skill and Insight skill check every now and then. Beyond that? Who knows.

It could be that they all speak Elvish the same way because their gods wished it to be so. For simplicity's sake.

Corinnguard said:

How would the reverse be better for D&D? Every world having elves who don't speak the same exact way. It would certainly lead to some interesting role-playing. You could have two elven characters from two different elven cultures trying to understand each other. Presumably with a Linguistics skill and Insight skill check every now and then. Beyond that? Who knows.

It could be that they all speak Elvish the same way because their gods wished it to be so. For simplicity's sake.

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The big problem for that is that D&D's elves don't all worship the same gods (and some, in Eberron, don't worship any gods). At least until all this multiverse guff started to be pushed by the powers that be.

Steampunkette said:

Moving the languages into cultures helps, to some degree. At least now everyone raised in the "Deep Dwarf" culture knows common, undercommon, and dwarf...

But what is "Dwarf" as a language except an example of a racial monolith spoken across the dwarf-related cultures?

The VRC cultures all give you "Common, plus another language" or two. Or three. Or whatever. But what are those languages? Dwarf, Elf, Auran, Gnome, Minotaur...

Which are the same across every planet, because no matter how far apart elves are in the galaxy they all speak Elven in the exact same way.

Click to expand...

My non-human species are so small in number and concentrated mostly in specific areas that they don't have a big variety of culture and language. Dwarves wandering human realms would speak the language of the land they come from, of course.

How often do your pcs talk to geographicly separated groups of a given species? In any campaign I’ve ever seen, you go to the Species Land, do your thing, and unless you come back to that Species Land, you never meet that species again.

Different planets? Unless you’re running Spelljammer, who cares? Most campaigns stay within a relatively small geographic area. Is it more realistic to have multiple languages? Sure. But it’s far too much work for the benefit.

The difference between speaking Elven and speaking Elthuvrian, language of the kingdoms of the Forest Lands, is practically nonexistent from a mechanical standpoint. At least in a game where the elves live in the elf lands.

But the narrative impact? Hits a bit different. Especially when a human speaks Elthuvrian as their primary language and only speaks the language of the Plains peoples, Torani, as a second language.

You can certainly add a bit of complexity when you introduce Antevrian, language of the kingdom of the Jungle Lands, across the northern sea. Where proficiency in Elthuvrian allows you to broadly communicate simple ideas... but unless you go to the Jungle Lands across the northern sea you don't really need to bother.

Tiny bit more investment into a specific world, rather than a generic system that gets further and further diluted as new race-specific languages are added.

There's a lot of fun things to think about when language and world-building meet.

Since elves have been brought up, they poses an interesting thought experiment. In 5e, elves live around 750 years (in some earlier editions, especially 1e, elves generally lived longer—especially some subraces like grey elves). So, elven language would evolve a LOT slower and be much more stable than human or orc languages. If elves are originally from the feywild, they'd probably had a unified language while there, and depending on how far back in your setting's timeline that elves emerged from the feywild to the prime material (maybe in multiple waves), the elven language may have drifted very little and thus multiple elven cultures may have mutually understandable languages even though they are separated by large distances.

Dwarves would have similarly stable languages (though to a lesser extent, as they are not as long lived as elves). And the language of dragons would be the most stable prime material language considering just how long those suckers live, with little to no change over many thousands of years.

Humans, orcs, goblins, and such all have short lives so languages would evolve relatively fast and even communities living nearish to each other may develop dialects and languages that may not be mutually intelligible.

Hussar said:

How often do your pcs talk to geographicly separated groups of a given species? In any campaign I’ve ever seen, you go to the Species Land, do your thing, and unless you come back to that Species Land, you never meet that species again.

Different planets? Unless you’re running Spelljammer, who cares? Most campaigns stay within a relatively small geographic area. Is it more realistic to have multiple languages? Sure. But it’s far too much work for the benefit.

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In my current campaign they've interacted with two major Dwarvish realms, separated by about the same distance as Vancouver Island and Cuba; and while it might make sense the Dwarves in these two realms would speak different languages they in fact speak the same one because that's the way Moradin wants it.

Between those two realms are Human lands encompassing about 8 or 9 different languages and Elvish lands encompassing three.

In terms of overall geographical area covered on their home world they've hit roughly the real-world equivalent of all of Europe (all the way to the north pole) plus the Middle East and some of the north half of Africa.

TBH, commom is just placeholder language and one of convenience. It's there to represent language all the players speak so their characters can communicate without trouble regardless what characters backgrounds are. Sure, if all the characters are from the same place, your "common" might be language of their hometown/province/kingdom what ever. It's also there to facilitate easy understanding between DM (trough NPCs) and Players (trough PCs). While playing broken telephone and lost in translation might be fun for some, for some is just tedium they wish to avoid.

FE One PC speaks elven and group talks to some elfs. Sure, one character understand what is said. But all the players hear what is said between DM and Player. So if player decides that their character might withhold some info, other players need to "forget" what they heard. Or in most cases, player just goes: Yeah, i just retell everyone what that NPC just told my character.

Azzy said:

There's a lot of fun things to think about when language and world-building meet.

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Especially when one language borrows words from one or more other languages over a given period of time. In D&D, Common is the Trade Tongue spoken by most of the inhabitants of a given world. Like English in RL, it probably has words from quite a number of races in it. Human, Elvish, Dwarvish, etc.

Fun fact, did you know there are 7 dialects of English?

1. North American English
2. British English
3. Scottish English
4. Irish English
5. Australian English
6. New Zealand English
7. Singlish- Singaporean English

Corinnguard said:

Fun fact, did you know there are 7 dialects of English?

1. North American English
2. British English
3. Scottish English
4. Irish English
5. Australian English
6. New Zealand English
7. Singlish- Singaporean English

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What is the basis for focusing on these in particular? Why not regional variations within England, for instance (which I think are more different from one another, in some cases at least, than is Australian from New Zealand English)? Why not Kenyan English? Etc.