What language is the Common of our world?

[trancejeremy]

Really though, most D&D campaign settings aren't world-wide. They are just regional. I mean, in Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms, there was going to be Kara-Tur (meant for Greyhawk, but put in FR), and they didn't speak regular common over there, AFAIK.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

There really isn't an equivalent, since no RW language has nearly the ubiquity of Common, but English is probably the closest.

It is not only spoken as the native or official language in many countries, it is also required for many jobs, like air-traffic controller and pilot.

French was once the language of diplomacy, but that is slowly being eroded by English as well.

I know many engineers and mathemeticians learn German because of the number of quality texts that simply haven't been translated into other tongues, but that, too is changing.

Chinese, with billions of native speakers would seem to be a more likely choice, but remember that English is the one of the main secondary languages taught in places like India and Pakistan- almost as populaced as China- and in many other nations all over the world.

Surprisingly, one of English's main competitors is probably Arabic. The Koran is only supposed to be written in Arabic (though unofficial translations may exist), so there is a strong impetus for about 1 billion+ people (and counting) to learn that language.

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

I'm voting English.

If one is willing to accept the (silly) notion that there is only one English, and it is mutally intelligilbe to all of its speakers, then English is clearly the closest real-world analog to Common we have. There are more speakers of Chinese than there are of all of the Englishes combined, but hey, there are probably almost undoubtably more speakers of Mandarin alone than there are English.

There are propably more speakers of Goblin, Orc, or even Undercommon than there are Common speakers in my campaign, but that doesn't make them Common (I mean no comparison between speakers of Mandarin or any other Chinese language and the often-wicked speakers of the three above-mentioned languages).

More people around the world are willing to claim proficiency and to do business in a language they refer to as "English" than any other language. Furthermore, these speakers are distributed over a greater geographical area than the speakers of any other language.

English is used as the [irony]lingua franca[/irony] in the U.S., most of Canada, The British Isles, India, and Australia. It is the new "official" language of the EU, and is a common second-language or foriegn language throughout much of Latin-America and Africa.

For world-building purposes, I use more than one "Common" for different parts of my campaign world. Mandio, Sat, Elven, and Goblin all provide coverage over large swathes of my campaign, and one would be hard pressed to find a too many settlements were no one speaks any of these languages. Draconic and Gnomish are scholarly languages spoken throughout my campaign and Abyssal, Infernal, and Celestial are the languages of doctrine, also overlapping the big four. A party capable of speaking these nine languages can speak to almost anyone in my campaign on just about any subject.

 

[Turjan]

It is a a matter of respect when in another culture to at least try, even if it's only a few words.

Sure, I agree. Nevertheless, the attitude of people in different countries or even regions is quite different depending on where you go. Some are much more opposed to using English or a different foreign language than others, even if they know the language relatively well.

 

[Nyeshet]

And the importance of English will continue to decrease as western cultures eventually get surpassed by India and China in the coming decades....it'll become more important for us to speak *their* languages.

Just a quick question. Which of their languages? Granted, China has an official form of chinese (mandarin) commonly in use, but in practice each region and sometimes even sub-region of the land has its own version of chinese - some of which are completely unintelligible with each other, to the point of being considered separate languages instead of dialects of a single language, such as Cantonese and Mandarin.

True, they have a common writing system, but I do not see the rest of the world adopting the chinese writing system so as to better understand chinese. It is just too complicated. Recent studies even showed that of the several areas in the brain used for language comprehension, one of them is actually different for chinese speakers when reading their language. This is not even taking into account the vast number of characters and the difficulty for swift typing on a keyboard made for using such. I have difficulty imagining such a keyboard in realistic sizes, actually.

As for India, there is no common indian language. Instead there are about a half dozen or so official languages - one of which is English (perhaps due to the fact that the British were in charge until a bit over a half century ago or so). Thus English has an edge even there. Note, incidentally, that Chinese teach English in their schools. I can't recall if it is mandatory or not, although I know that in Japan it is often mandatory at the High School level if the student is persuring a Liberal Arts degree (in which case Chinese and I think ancient Chinese are also mandatory - or perhaps that's only at some schools?).

 

[Merkuri]

This is not even taking into account the vast number of characters [in Mandarin] and the difficulty for swift typing on a keyboard made for using such. I have difficulty imagining such a keyboard in realistic sizes, actually.

I knew someone in college who majored in the Japanese language, which has a similar style of writing. I saw him typing in Japanese on his computer a few times. He'd type a bunch of little characters which would every once and a while dissapear and be replaced by one big character. I asked him about it, and he said that he was typing in the phonetic alphabet, and when a full word was formed it would replace the phonetic characters with the "formal" (if that's the right term) character for that word. I imagine typing in Mandarin would be similar. The keyboard represents phonetic characters, and the computer is smart enough to replace the phonetics with word-characters when a word is formed.

 

[Turjan]

I knew someone in college who majored in the Japanese language, which has a similar style of writing. I saw him typing in Japanese on his computer a few times. He'd type a bunch of little characters which would every once and a while dissapear and be replaced by one big character. I asked him about it, and he said that he was typing in the phonetic alphabet, and when a full word was formed it would replace the phonetic characters with the "formal" (if that's the right term) character for that word. I imagine typing in Mandarin would be similar. The keyboard represents phonetic characters, and the computer is smart enough to replace the phonetics with word-characters when a word is formed.

My Chinese colleagues have no problem whatsoever with quickly typing their Chinese character letters on a standard US keyboard. They just type everything in Pinyin, and the computer changes this to Chinese characters, as you described in your Japanese example.

 

[RFisher]

Censui pro lingua latina quia potui.

 

[SpiralBound]

English. Hands down. And will continue to do so for the forseeable future. In fact, the emergence of India and China will only further strengthen this fact. In several hundred years the "Earth Common" will still be "English", but were you or I transported to that distant time, we would not recognise it as English and would essentially have to learn this new language before we could communicate. The above trends and their results have already occured in our history with English. An English-speaking person from 2-300 years ago would be lost by what we call "English".

When China becomes the dominent cultural, economic and political force that it simply will have to become due to it's sheer size alone, they will be talking to us with English. The syntax may or may not be slightly off and there may be the occasional misuse of a word or the occasional addition of a Mandarin word, but overall it'll be 95% "English as we know it". However, as we all become used to the "new order" of having Chinese culture and interests influencing 60 to 90 percent of our daily activities, other cultures will become interested in Chinese culture (similar to how Japanese culture became so popular, but even more so) and due to this, even more Chinese words, syntax and structures will be adopted into English - more so by non-Chinese than the Chinese themselves.

All of the above mentioned activities regarding Chinese will happen to other cultures & languages (Indian, Spanish, Russian, etc.) to varying degrees depending on their degree of influence over the dominent world culture. This has been happening over and over again for the past 4-600 years and I see no existing or likely future trend that will interupt this. Over time, what we call "English" will become even more of a mishmash of other languages than it already is. After all, English is the "de facto lingua franca"!

So, why do I think it will flow this way and not simply get replaced? Because this is easier than forcing everyone to adopt a new language. Also, the Chinese, Indians, Spanish, Africans, Swedes, Russians, etc. are already adopting English as the default language to use when communicating with other cultures, whether professionally or casually. Hands up who speaks a different native tongue than what they type here at Enworld... I'm not making grandiose oracular predictions, I'm only identifying both historical precedence and existing trends. 90% of current-day "English" words ,syntax and strucures, are formed of bits and pieces of Greek, French, Latin, Spanish, Gaelic, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, German, Norse, Arabic, Yiddish, etc and has little resemblence to the old Anglo-Saxon-Norman blending that formed the original "English". At this point, adding Mandarin, Hindu, and some more Spanish to the mix is par for the course and to be expected, Heck, let's toss in some Urdu while we're at it for good measure! Just remember, should you go time travelling into the future, make sure you stop every 50 years or so and spend about a year there to acclimatize to the changing linguistic and cultural thoughtscape. Yes, it'll greatly lengthen your travel time to the year 2206, but you'll thank me when you reach your destination and you only appear to be "quaintly old-fashioned" rather than the equivalent of a cro-mag with a lobotomy!

 

[Torm]

<snip> Yes, it'll greatly lengthen your travel time to the year 2206, but you'll thank me when you reach your destination and you only appear to be "quaintly old-fashioned" rather than the equivalent of a cro-mag with a lobotomy!

While there might be a great deal of new slang by then, our technology is probably doing a good deal to slow down change in English vocabulary, much as it is doing to gradually eliminate accents in favor of "generic Midwestern". I would think most of the new formal words you would have to learn would be new words coined for new technologies, in which case I'm not sure you wouldn't just be adding work to stop every 50 years to learn words that are antiquated on the next stop.

Besides, any future worth going to is going to include a civilization that would have you well taken care of due to your importance to historians and for endorsements and advertising. Anything that would make you LESS authentically from 200 years in the past would just be a negative.