What language is the Common of our world?

[Radovarl]

Common

With all due respect, this is possibly the silliest poll I've seen so far. There is nothing remotely close to "Common" in real life. The idea of a Common language in D&D is an artificial (and not a very realistic) game convention meant to get around the in-play difficulties that would result from characters of different nationalities/races speaking different, mutually unintelligible tongues. Sure, Greek and Latin were fairly widely spoken in the Roman Empire, and Aramaic in the biblical Middle East, French and Spanish at were pretty widespread in colonial times, etc., but never to the extent that Common is spoken in any of the major campaign settings.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

With all due respect, this is possibly the silliest poll I've seen so far. There is nothing remotely close to "Common" in real life.

I did include that as an option for that reason.

Sure, Greek and Latin were fairly widely spoken in the Roman Empire, and Aramaic in the biblical Middle East, French and Spanish at were pretty widespread in colonial times, etc., but never to the extent that Common is spoken in any of the major campaign settings.

Isn't that more a problem of the campaign settings instead of a problem with Common, as it's used in the core rules?

Or, rather, might those campaign settings merely be the equivalent of, say, modern Europe, where most people speak a native language and typically speak 1-2 more? And one of those extras is almost inevitably English ...

 

[ThirdWizard]

The universal language of mathematics!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Hmm, according to this article, 90 percent (!) of European high school students learn English, even if it's not their primary language: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ces/pub/Swaan_june02.html

If that's true, then the Modern Europe campaign setting sure seems like it would have English as its Common.

Obviously, different campaign settings would have a different language in that role. In the Middle East, it would be Arabic, even though many of the natives are not Arabs (and will tell you that with great enthusiasm if you call them that), due to the prominence of the in-Arabic-only Koran in their culture.

 

[Shemeska]

English as it's currently the language of commerce. Spanish, Hindi, and Mandarin might have more native speakers, but I suspect that they're not used outside of their respective locals as a trade language. How many brazilians learn mandarin, or how many chinese learn spanish versus how many of both know basic english?

Of course in the future I suspect that we'll all speak english and curse in mandarin. Or maybe I've just been watching too much Firefly.

 

[Huw]

By "Chinese" I presume you meant "Mandarin", in the same way you wrote "Spanish" not "Latin".

I voted for none, though English is close to being a world language, with Spanish, Mandarin and Hindi significant in their own spheres. No other language is even close to those four (which between them will let you speak to over half the world) - not even Arabic (which is so divergent that it's only lingua franca amongst educated Arabs who know classical Arabic).

 

[shilsen]

Considering there's more than twice as many Mandarin chinese speakers than english speakers, I find it a bit hard to vote for English as the "Common of our world".

That statistic is highly flawed. IIRC, the above stats are generated by considering what an individual's first language of communication is. So what gets completely ignored is the fact that a large number of those Mandarin chinese speakers range from slightly to completely fluent in English, while only a tiny percentage of those whose first language is English are also fluent in Mandarin.

The population of India is similarly statistically divided into speakers of Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, and so on. But, as an Indian, I can vouch for the fact that not only are a large percentage of these so-called non-English speakers very fluent in English, but English often functions as the preferred mode of communication between speakers of different Indian languages or dialects, just as Common does in a D&D world. Heck, English is one of India's two national languages, for exactly the above reason.

If someone did an accurate survey of languages used and included anyone who could understand at least some of the language, English would be the in the lead by far.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

English is the most widely-spoken language in the world; an estimated 24% of the world population can make themselves understood in it. Chinese is the language that the most people claim as their native language, though.

The explanation is that an awful lot of people worldwide learn English as a second language.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

By "Chinese" I presume you meant "Mandarin", in the same way you wrote "Spanish" not "Latin".

They're used pretty interchangeably here in America. Here's what "Chinese language" pulls up over at the US version of Amazon, for instance.

And having lived in the Middle East, I think you're overestimating how hard it is for Arabic speakers to muddle through understanding one another. Worst case scenario, they can whip out a piece of paper and write messages down, since the regional variations are mostly changes in vowels (which aren't written outside of the Koran and children's books). Yes, some of the accents will be thick, but they won't be awful. And since Egyptian movies and television are widely disseminated in the Arabic-speaking world, an Egyptian Arabic-speaker in particular would be pretty well understood by everyone else.

 

[Baron Opal]

My wife, who is in the computer field, has worked with a number of Indians whose only language is English. Born and raised in India, mind you. These people were urbanites, those raised in rural India either knew or were raised in their local dialect.

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