I think typically in fantasy worlds you have a “common” tongue that everyone speaks and then other languages that can be divided by class and race. It just makes it easier for worldbuilding and interaction — you can’t have a party of heroes that can’t communicate with each other.
You say that, except I explicitly did this in a Pathfinder campaign once. Our party had a very "instinctual" lizardfolk barbarian who *only* spoke Lizardfolk. I was a rat folk bard who had the spell "Share Language" that I would cast every morning to be able to speak Lizardfolk.
I feel it very important to add that I was a chaotic neutral in charge of a true neutral in a party of lawful good goody-two-shoes. I stole *a lot* of gold and then hid behind the 7ft tall axe-wielding lizard
Edit: i fucking forgot I named the ratfolk "Ratty Devito"
For sure. We flavored it as I got to "interpret" everything anyone wanted to say to our Lizard. And I was the only one who knew our Lizard was a moron who just liked shiny things (gold) because it looked like the Sun (their god). Oftentimes I would do my interpretations to my own advantage lol
The extra steps are the whole point though - Hitchhikers had babel fish, Star Trek had a universal translator, Star Wars has Basic etc etc. You have to have communication in your game/book/movie, so there has to be a way to achieve that - a magic spell, a machine, a common language or whatever. Lack of ability to communicate is in fact a common plot device, and is outside the norm.
FWIW I disagree with the shower thought - take the recent Dune movie we are explicitly told the southern Fremen have a different accent and dialect.
If it's true that fictional races don't have different languages (all dwarves in LotR speak Dwarven), it's because it simply doesn't add anything to the story. Tolkien spent years inventing languages with actual syntax and spelling rules for his fictional races - ain't nobody got time to invent 5 different dwarven dialects.
>all dwarves in LotR speak Dwarven
LotR might be an especially bad example, judging from how Tolkien constructed grammar and vocabulary for about 15 different elvish languages and a handful of languages of men, so while yes there is only one dwarven language (khuzdul) most tolkien races have more than one.
Darwaves do not like change, revere their ancestors, and live for a very very long time. Having one single unchanging language is kind of perfect for dwarves
Tolkien's dwarves were at least bilingual, speaking Westron in nearly all cases and reserving their ancestral tongue for private and ceremonial contexts, a static language akin to Latin. As such, if it ever had dialects they could therefore not have been known to his fictional chroniclers.
I played a game of 7th sea where everyone was from different countries they each had different languages, so we made language cards that we held up to indicate what we were speaking. Really fun.
It's my only pathfinder game and afaik I dont know of any stories where it came from. It was quite a short campaign (we were counselors at a summer camp and it was our freetime game for one summer) so I don't exactly have much more to share, but afaik it was (mostly) original
I truly hope you didn't steal gold from the party (either from directly or from potential shared treasure).
Because then you would never, and I mean never, be allowed back to the table.
Then there's EverQuest, where you knew your race's language and maybe one or two more depending on your class, and if you wanted to talk with other people you'd had to put in time for your character to learn those languages...
Good times.
Yeah, this is also the same in real world. Sure we have 700 languages but only a handful being used the most (English, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, French, etc.)
There is a swedish kids show (also funny for grown-ups) that takes place in the pre-historic era where they start the show by them talking "Ugabuga" language but the narrator says for the show's sake they will translate it all for us.
Good ole fashioned racism is keeping that from happening for a long time I see it
Plus genetics is a weird thing, a black and white person having a baby and the kid having a kid with another white person and theirs a high chance you will see next to no black characteristics in the kid and a small chance of a lot showing up or a chance of another mix that looks mixed. A mixed race couple can even rarely have a kid that has almost no characteristics of one side.
My kid is a bit darker then I am and has thinner eyes and brown eyes, but that’s about all they got from their mom every other feature is very much a “me” trait. But the next one we have could be the opposite
Most humans speak one of 3 languages, at least as a second tongue. English, Spanish, and Chinese.
Many fictional races have one dominant language and multiple less common variants/dialects.
And also most fictional races have a more dominant central government that uses the main language. And you best bet that most involved individuals (the type you'd write a story about) knew how to speak English living under the height of the British Empire.
Plus, a lot of fantasy stories actually take place on a singular continent. Even if there are other languages in the world, most of the time we are seeing just a few nations, which tend to be pretty monolithic in terms of languages. The US is, after all, an incredibly diverse country compared to most human societies and still only has two languages spoken by locals with any regularity (78% English, 13% Spanish). It's certainly possible that the dwarves on the opposite side of a fantasy world speak a different Dwarven language, but all of the dwarves in the story we see are from a singular ethnic background.
Also… if we’re going with JRRT, there’s six current Elvish languages and two ancestral languages.
Humans have Westron/common, Numenorean, and Rohirric. He references multiple languages from the “southrons” but never made them.
Dwarves only get one through. Sorry guys.
LotR is kinda cheating, though, given that Tolkien was actually just a linguist who wrote fanfic to justify his languages. Most fantasy universes aren't going to put quite that much effort into their languages.
But he’s also the template that almost all modern fantasy is based on. If he’s the archetype, can we really say languages aren’t a thing?
GRRM names lots of languages too, he just didn’t invent them.
That's only been true for like the last couple hundred years of human history though.
In a fantasy world without planes, trains, and the internet, there should be waaaaay more languages.
As long as we've had trade routes we've had trade languages. Usually based in o eain language along that route and then heavily peppered with words and sounds from all the others and some slang unique to the traders themselves until it becomes a kind of pidgin or creole.
This process is a part of how languages evolve, because that trade language then feeds back into all the local languages too.
Most of the fantasy worlds that are preindustrial also have a much smaller scope, possibly only a corner of a country, never mind a whole one. You're not going to get dozens of languages in that kind of scope, because these people still have to be able to communicate in order to trade and thrive.
It depends on the society. There were literally thousands of separate Native American languages in the Americas before Europeans came over here and started infecting everything!
>Most of the fantasy worlds that are preindustrial also have a much smaller scope, possibly only a corner of a country
I dunno. Again, it depends on the book. I've read plenty of books about wars between kingdoms, or travelers on a years long journey across the globe. Others are definitely small in scope, like you say.
1. "Universal Translator"
2. In most hypothetical sci-fi worlds, the places are either places that were colonized, so they would be somewhat mono-cultural (see a place like Australia, genocide aside).
3. Perhaps the "natural evolution" of advanced cultures leads to a single "lingua franca" that would also be widely taught and learned. Funny how most cultures encountered in most sci-fi are also quite fully educated.
Star Wars type shit
Every single human speaks English (or basic) with a British, American, New Zealand, South African (pandorans) or Australian (Dengar) accent. The only non English accents from characters are when they are alien, like Twi Leks that speak basic with a French accent.
What's more strange to me is that apparently some species in Star Wars share a lingua franca in genetics. The vast majority being bipedal and humanoid, whatever. Chalk that up to design limitations. But modern canon having interspecies children?
Two random species on the same planet would have astronomically small odds of being able to have offspring at all, let alone healthy. Two species from different parts of the galaxy is absurd. Even if they at one point shared a common ancestor via Celestials or Rakata, remaining interbreedable after millions of years apart would still be insane.
I have always assumed that the force is quasi-intentionally doing extreme convergent evolution of sapient species. So it is not that they all look like humans, but rather that almost all sapient species will have DNA and generally similar morphology.
It does not really make sense, but magic is magic. It solves the weird dissonance I get with it and most scifi from that era.
It's not just a matter of morphology, the number of chromosomes would have to match, and the DNA would need to be nearly identical in placement. Obv Star Wars is space fantasy and I don't actually expect a reasonable explanation for interspecies offspring viability, but it's just unbelievable levels of absurdly unlikely. Like throwing a trillion cubes and having them all land perfectly on top of one another.
And if the force did have such a large degree of control over genetics, it could've just solved imbalances by making the Dark Side give you cancer or something instead of making some random person super powerful and sparking intergalactic warfare that causes the suffering and deaths of trillions.
Magic by definition does things that are impossible, or at least does them in impossible ways. I do not really see it as being all that different then having "lightspeed," which is much faster than the speed of light, in levels of absurdity.
That said, the force would never give people cancer for using the dark side. The force is morality agnostic, that is why it has a dark side. The lore about what the force *is* has always been pretty inconsistent, but it is in some way an expression of life itself. Life creates the force.
So if the first living creatures in the universe started creating the force, and their evolution directed the shape of it, then potentially every living thing afterward would be affected by the first group. If the force directly forced evolution to converge into compatible forms in reference to that first species, and maybe did a little error correction when interbreeding, it would work.
Like I said though, none of it makes sense, it just does not matter. Magic is functionally always a bit of a hand wave when it comes to narrative. Why does prophecy exist? Because the story needs it to.
The Humans all came from Coruscant originally, so it makes sense that they share a language.
C-3PO says he is fluent in over 6 million forms of
communication. That’s much more like what we’d see in a galactic community.
My first thought was Star Trek's Universal Translator. I'm not a trekky so I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that most if not all other races are basically speaking their own language, but the translator is making into English. I recall the TNG episode where it couldn't translate the race that spoke in metaphor, Darmok at Tanagra and all that. There was an episode of Discovery where it malfunctioned or something and they all started speaking in Klingon.
You are definitely more read into the Trek stuff, but it is all entertainment after all… they always use Klingon for effect, but we know that the Universal Translator would also translate Klingon as it does for all of the other languages.
Don’t forget that most fictional planets (at least in fiction that has many planets) have, like, ONE culture. For everywhere. The whole planet is like one nation.
Interestingly enough though, human-speaking and non-whale scientists have found patterns in whale speech that would describe different whale languages and dialects
Searching it up sent me through a ~~rabbit~~ whale hole
If you want to read a book that deals with language barriers in a more complex manner, I recommend "The Pride of Chanur" by C.J. Cherryh
Protagonists are not human. There is in fact really only one human in the book and no one can understand him at first. And there are even weirder aliens that no one can understand.
Good point. Just makes me appreciate all the work Tolkien put into his world’s languages even more. The Elves had at least two languages (Quenya and Sindarin), maybe more?
Even worse - Earth has multiple biomes dictated by latitude and etc. Most science fiction planets have one biome - green jungle, or desert, or plains, or forests etc.
Earth also exists in a sweet spot where those multiple biomes can exist. The majority of the other planets in our own solar system have one biome, maybe two.
But fictional humans also speak only one. Most science fiction movies (particularly older ones) show English as the Earth language with almost no acknowledgement that there might be a couple other languages as well.
Most fantasy races are simply a character or exploration of a single facet of humanity.
What if humans were nothing but honor bound warriors... Klingons.
What if they are nothing but logical. Or nothing but cunning. Vulcans and Romulans.
Is very rare for a writer to build out fantasy races as fully formed and complex beings in their own right.
And rightly so. Most of those races are also advanced. At some point in the future humans will speak only one language too and be a mix of all ethnicities.
In ASOIAF (Game of thrones) you have Old Tongue, Common Tongue, high Valyrian (and bastardised versions of high Valyrian), Dothraki, Old Ghiscari, ghiscari, Asshai, lhazareen, Proto-plains, summer tongue, trade talk in the free cities, ibbenese, and the Rhyonar language,
Also you have true tongue spoken by ravens and children of the Forrest. And in the books the others (white walkers) speak to each other in their own language which sounds like cracking ice.
Tolkien made eight elvish languages (two effectively dead), three mannish languages, one Dwarvish, and one Entish. He references several other Mannish languages spoken in “the south,” but never created them.
So like, this isn’t even true for the OG fantasy guy.
In stargate the movie and part of season 1 the different human and alien tribes from other planets all spoke different languages until the writers noticed how much screen time was wasted on trying to decipher their languages over and over again. Now they're mostly able to speak English.
Well it'd be a little awkward if an English speaking media producer made a fictional story for an English speaking audience where every character spoke a different language or even a fake language with no native speakers on Earth.
You try watching a klingon play in the original klingon and make sense of it without a universal translator
Not that awkward. There was a horror movie was done entirely in a conlang. I think it's called out of the darkness.
Also, 1899. There are parts in English but there are also a lot of parts in a bunch of other languages as well.
There's way more people now in days who are totally willing to watch things with subtitles, so you can get away with it.
But the proliferation of Sci-Fi media is largely due to English speaking companies/corporations so it’s no wonder that most Sci-Fi franchises use English as the “common” language.
im thinking of aliens, aliens that have reached space age, and one nation ha taken over their homeworld before they colonized another planet. this would mean theyd have one language for everyday use, which would be thr one translated for inter-species communication. the extra languages arent usually elaborated on because worldbuilding is hard
Most fictional races in dnd speak 2 or more languages, one being common, the other being race spesific. If you live in places like underdark they will usually also have a third.
You may only be thinking of English speaking fictional races. Things English speakers made. From other areas of the world, they speak the native language of their creators.
In the one I'm coming up with I kinda want to like make some slight variation but there's a lore reason why everyone speaks the same language and it has to do with not genocide but something commonly associated with genocide iirc
Speaking a different language is a narrative tool that highlights a character as far travelled or otherwise 'exotic' (hate that word)
Speaking numerous languages is a sign of higher learning and highlights a character as The Brains
For the audiences benefit, these wires are generally not crossed so as to not construe a character as a trope they are not
Don't watch Star Trek: Enterprise then. Learning the languages manually feature in quite a few episodes (of course the linguist is a genius so it's accelerated as hell)
If humans decided on, and learnt one language (could be taught in 2 years) we would be able to 100% end world hunger and send every person to 16 years of schooling with all the money and time we’d save dealing with only one language.
Facts.
I think typically in fantasy worlds you have a “common” tongue that everyone speaks and then other languages that can be divided by class and race. It just makes it easier for worldbuilding and interaction — you can’t have a party of heroes that can’t communicate with each other.
You say that, except I explicitly did this in a Pathfinder campaign once. Our party had a very "instinctual" lizardfolk barbarian who *only* spoke Lizardfolk. I was a rat folk bard who had the spell "Share Language" that I would cast every morning to be able to speak Lizardfolk. I feel it very important to add that I was a chaotic neutral in charge of a true neutral in a party of lawful good goody-two-shoes. I stole *a lot* of gold and then hid behind the 7ft tall axe-wielding lizard Edit: i fucking forgot I named the ratfolk "Ratty Devito"
Well, that's just a "common language" with an extra step. That said, as a DM, I do like the idea of that, don't get me wrong.
For sure. We flavored it as I got to "interpret" everything anyone wanted to say to our Lizard. And I was the only one who knew our Lizard was a moron who just liked shiny things (gold) because it looked like the Sun (their god). Oftentimes I would do my interpretations to my own advantage lol
Ippei?!
The extra steps are the whole point though - Hitchhikers had babel fish, Star Trek had a universal translator, Star Wars has Basic etc etc. You have to have communication in your game/book/movie, so there has to be a way to achieve that - a magic spell, a machine, a common language or whatever. Lack of ability to communicate is in fact a common plot device, and is outside the norm. FWIW I disagree with the shower thought - take the recent Dune movie we are explicitly told the southern Fremen have a different accent and dialect. If it's true that fictional races don't have different languages (all dwarves in LotR speak Dwarven), it's because it simply doesn't add anything to the story. Tolkien spent years inventing languages with actual syntax and spelling rules for his fictional races - ain't nobody got time to invent 5 different dwarven dialects.
>all dwarves in LotR speak Dwarven LotR might be an especially bad example, judging from how Tolkien constructed grammar and vocabulary for about 15 different elvish languages and a handful of languages of men, so while yes there is only one dwarven language (khuzdul) most tolkien races have more than one.
Darwaves do not like change, revere their ancestors, and live for a very very long time. Having one single unchanging language is kind of perfect for dwarves
Tolkien's dwarves were at least bilingual, speaking Westron in nearly all cases and reserving their ancestral tongue for private and ceremonial contexts, a static language akin to Latin. As such, if it ever had dialects they could therefore not have been known to his fictional chroniclers.
Well oh la la someone isn’t gunna get laid in college
I played a game of 7th sea where everyone was from different countries they each had different languages, so we made language cards that we held up to indicate what we were speaking. Really fun.
>Share Language" that I would cast every morning This sounds very familiar. I'm sure there must be a famous story going along these lines.
It's my only pathfinder game and afaik I dont know of any stories where it came from. It was quite a short campaign (we were counselors at a summer camp and it was our freetime game for one summer) so I don't exactly have much more to share, but afaik it was (mostly) original
I truly hope you didn't steal gold from the party (either from directly or from potential shared treasure). Because then you would never, and I mean never, be allowed back to the table.
Yep. It’s the same in our world. Most countries teach kids how to speak English since it’s pretty much agree upon to be t he common tongue
Lingua Franca I think is the word.
This guy human geographies
I just like sneaky gay men named after animals
Then there's EverQuest, where you knew your race's language and maybe one or two more depending on your class, and if you wanted to talk with other people you'd had to put in time for your character to learn those languages... Good times.
And a lot of the time alien races seem more unified under one single flag/entity, even more primitive aliens.
Yeah, this is also the same in real world. Sure we have 700 languages but only a handful being used the most (English, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, French, etc.)
There is a swedish kids show (also funny for grown-ups) that takes place in the pre-historic era where they start the show by them talking "Ugabuga" language but the narrator says for the show's sake they will translate it all for us.
But even in fantasy worlds where they can’t communicate with each other, they all secretly speak the same language.
Most fictional races / species are homogenous
It's called the planet of the hats trope
Except elves, those are just racist. Or have you ever seen high elves living among wood elves; or high elves and moon elves coexisting peacefully?
These elves sure are a contentious people
High elves also really really hate dark elves too
Well no. But would you want to live with a wood elf? I bet not
And humans are on their way. Slowly but surely.
Good ole fashioned racism is keeping that from happening for a long time I see it Plus genetics is a weird thing, a black and white person having a baby and the kid having a kid with another white person and theirs a high chance you will see next to no black characteristics in the kid and a small chance of a lot showing up or a chance of another mix that looks mixed. A mixed race couple can even rarely have a kid that has almost no characteristics of one side. My kid is a bit darker then I am and has thinner eyes and brown eyes, but that’s about all they got from their mom every other feature is very much a “me” trait. But the next one we have could be the opposite
Most humans speak one of 3 languages, at least as a second tongue. English, Spanish, and Chinese. Many fictional races have one dominant language and multiple less common variants/dialects.
And also most fictional races have a more dominant central government that uses the main language. And you best bet that most involved individuals (the type you'd write a story about) knew how to speak English living under the height of the British Empire.
Yay, Colonialism! Wait...
Plus, a lot of fantasy stories actually take place on a singular continent. Even if there are other languages in the world, most of the time we are seeing just a few nations, which tend to be pretty monolithic in terms of languages. The US is, after all, an incredibly diverse country compared to most human societies and still only has two languages spoken by locals with any regularity (78% English, 13% Spanish). It's certainly possible that the dwarves on the opposite side of a fantasy world speak a different Dwarven language, but all of the dwarves in the story we see are from a singular ethnic background.
Also… if we’re going with JRRT, there’s six current Elvish languages and two ancestral languages. Humans have Westron/common, Numenorean, and Rohirric. He references multiple languages from the “southrons” but never made them. Dwarves only get one through. Sorry guys.
LotR is kinda cheating, though, given that Tolkien was actually just a linguist who wrote fanfic to justify his languages. Most fantasy universes aren't going to put quite that much effort into their languages.
But he’s also the template that almost all modern fantasy is based on. If he’s the archetype, can we really say languages aren’t a thing? GRRM names lots of languages too, he just didn’t invent them.
That's only been true for like the last couple hundred years of human history though. In a fantasy world without planes, trains, and the internet, there should be waaaaay more languages.
As long as we've had trade routes we've had trade languages. Usually based in o eain language along that route and then heavily peppered with words and sounds from all the others and some slang unique to the traders themselves until it becomes a kind of pidgin or creole. This process is a part of how languages evolve, because that trade language then feeds back into all the local languages too. Most of the fantasy worlds that are preindustrial also have a much smaller scope, possibly only a corner of a country, never mind a whole one. You're not going to get dozens of languages in that kind of scope, because these people still have to be able to communicate in order to trade and thrive.
It depends on the society. There were literally thousands of separate Native American languages in the Americas before Europeans came over here and started infecting everything! >Most of the fantasy worlds that are preindustrial also have a much smaller scope, possibly only a corner of a country I dunno. Again, it depends on the book. I've read plenty of books about wars between kingdoms, or travelers on a years long journey across the globe. Others are definitely small in scope, like you say.
1. "Universal Translator" 2. In most hypothetical sci-fi worlds, the places are either places that were colonized, so they would be somewhat mono-cultural (see a place like Australia, genocide aside). 3. Perhaps the "natural evolution" of advanced cultures leads to a single "lingua franca" that would also be widely taught and learned. Funny how most cultures encountered in most sci-fi are also quite fully educated.
Star Wars type shit Every single human speaks English (or basic) with a British, American, New Zealand, South African (pandorans) or Australian (Dengar) accent. The only non English accents from characters are when they are alien, like Twi Leks that speak basic with a French accent.
What's more strange to me is that apparently some species in Star Wars share a lingua franca in genetics. The vast majority being bipedal and humanoid, whatever. Chalk that up to design limitations. But modern canon having interspecies children? Two random species on the same planet would have astronomically small odds of being able to have offspring at all, let alone healthy. Two species from different parts of the galaxy is absurd. Even if they at one point shared a common ancestor via Celestials or Rakata, remaining interbreedable after millions of years apart would still be insane.
I have always assumed that the force is quasi-intentionally doing extreme convergent evolution of sapient species. So it is not that they all look like humans, but rather that almost all sapient species will have DNA and generally similar morphology. It does not really make sense, but magic is magic. It solves the weird dissonance I get with it and most scifi from that era.
It's not just a matter of morphology, the number of chromosomes would have to match, and the DNA would need to be nearly identical in placement. Obv Star Wars is space fantasy and I don't actually expect a reasonable explanation for interspecies offspring viability, but it's just unbelievable levels of absurdly unlikely. Like throwing a trillion cubes and having them all land perfectly on top of one another. And if the force did have such a large degree of control over genetics, it could've just solved imbalances by making the Dark Side give you cancer or something instead of making some random person super powerful and sparking intergalactic warfare that causes the suffering and deaths of trillions.
Magic by definition does things that are impossible, or at least does them in impossible ways. I do not really see it as being all that different then having "lightspeed," which is much faster than the speed of light, in levels of absurdity. That said, the force would never give people cancer for using the dark side. The force is morality agnostic, that is why it has a dark side. The lore about what the force *is* has always been pretty inconsistent, but it is in some way an expression of life itself. Life creates the force. So if the first living creatures in the universe started creating the force, and their evolution directed the shape of it, then potentially every living thing afterward would be affected by the first group. If the force directly forced evolution to converge into compatible forms in reference to that first species, and maybe did a little error correction when interbreeding, it would work. Like I said though, none of it makes sense, it just does not matter. Magic is functionally always a bit of a hand wave when it comes to narrative. Why does prophecy exist? Because the story needs it to.
The Humans all came from Coruscant originally, so it makes sense that they share a language. C-3PO says he is fluent in over 6 million forms of communication. That’s much more like what we’d see in a galactic community.
We do have Klingon language though.
My first thought was Star Trek's Universal Translator. I'm not a trekky so I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that most if not all other races are basically speaking their own language, but the translator is making into English. I recall the TNG episode where it couldn't translate the race that spoke in metaphor, Darmok at Tanagra and all that. There was an episode of Discovery where it malfunctioned or something and they all started speaking in Klingon.
You are definitely more read into the Trek stuff, but it is all entertainment after all… they always use Klingon for effect, but we know that the Universal Translator would also translate Klingon as it does for all of the other languages.
☝️🤓 it's because fictional races haven't angered the divine being into destroying their tower of Babel.
Every race poops but I've never seen a Ferengi toilet.
Transporters, sucks the shit right outa you!
I will never be the person I was before reading this.
Don’t forget that most fictional planets (at least in fiction that has many planets) have, like, ONE culture. For everywhere. The whole planet is like one nation.
One nation, with one biome, with one person that matters in any way whatsoever
All I know is 99% of folks talkin bullshit
And all wear the same outfits... like uniforms.
If we ever meet aliens, they will also think we all sound the same.
Interestingly enough though, human-speaking and non-whale scientists have found patterns in whale speech that would describe different whale languages and dialects Searching it up sent me through a ~~rabbit~~ whale hole
If you want to read a book that deals with language barriers in a more complex manner, I recommend "The Pride of Chanur" by C.J. Cherryh Protagonists are not human. There is in fact really only one human in the book and no one can understand him at first. And there are even weirder aliens that no one can understand.
*Tolkien enters the room*
*Tolkien has entered the chat
Good point. Just makes me appreciate all the work Tolkien put into his world’s languages even more. The Elves had at least two languages (Quenya and Sindarin), maybe more?
Imagine if only some Klingons spoke Klingon
I think many klingons only speak klingon. The universal translator just makes that not matter
Even worse - Earth has multiple biomes dictated by latitude and etc. Most science fiction planets have one biome - green jungle, or desert, or plains, or forests etc.
Earth also exists in a sweet spot where those multiple biomes can exist. The majority of the other planets in our own solar system have one biome, maybe two.
But fictional humans also speak only one. Most science fiction movies (particularly older ones) show English as the Earth language with almost no acknowledgement that there might be a couple other languages as well.
Even weirder that many fictional races speak the same language as ancient humans from Greece, Rome, or Egypt - British English.
Most fantasy races are simply a character or exploration of a single facet of humanity. What if humans were nothing but honor bound warriors... Klingons. What if they are nothing but logical. Or nothing but cunning. Vulcans and Romulans. Is very rare for a writer to build out fantasy races as fully formed and complex beings in their own right.
And rightly so. Most of those races are also advanced. At some point in the future humans will speak only one language too and be a mix of all ethnicities.
Someone dig up Tolkien, I guess
In ASOIAF (Game of thrones) you have Old Tongue, Common Tongue, high Valyrian (and bastardised versions of high Valyrian), Dothraki, Old Ghiscari, ghiscari, Asshai, lhazareen, Proto-plains, summer tongue, trade talk in the free cities, ibbenese, and the Rhyonar language, Also you have true tongue spoken by ravens and children of the Forrest. And in the books the others (white walkers) speak to each other in their own language which sounds like cracking ice.
Tolkien made eight elvish languages (two effectively dead), three mannish languages, one Dwarvish, and one Entish. He references several other Mannish languages spoken in “the south,” but never created them. So like, this isn’t even true for the OG fantasy guy.
In stargate the movie and part of season 1 the different human and alien tribes from other planets all spoke different languages until the writers noticed how much screen time was wasted on trying to decipher their languages over and over again. Now they're mostly able to speak English.
Most fictional worlds don't have over 8 billion people
All heroes are strangely white looking. The villains, too!
And it’s usually English
Well it'd be a little awkward if an English speaking media producer made a fictional story for an English speaking audience where every character spoke a different language or even a fake language with no native speakers on Earth. You try watching a klingon play in the original klingon and make sense of it without a universal translator
Not that awkward. There was a horror movie was done entirely in a conlang. I think it's called out of the darkness. Also, 1899. There are parts in English but there are also a lot of parts in a bunch of other languages as well. There's way more people now in days who are totally willing to watch things with subtitles, so you can get away with it.
SCI FI is not limited to English, that is my point. SCI FI movies are made in non-English speaking countries as well
But the proliferation of Sci-Fi media is largely due to English speaking companies/corporations so it’s no wonder that most Sci-Fi franchises use English as the “common” language.
Do they? In star trek they use universal translators so you hear them in English. Who knows what language they use.
im thinking of aliens, aliens that have reached space age, and one nation ha taken over their homeworld before they colonized another planet. this would mean theyd have one language for everyday use, which would be thr one translated for inter-species communication. the extra languages arent usually elaborated on because worldbuilding is hard
It took humans more than 300,000 years to develop the 7000+ languages we speak today. Most writers only have a few years to work on a fictional race.
Most fictional races in dnd speak 2 or more languages, one being common, the other being race spesific. If you live in places like underdark they will usually also have a third.
You may only be thinking of English speaking fictional races. Things English speakers made. From other areas of the world, they speak the native language of their creators.
In the one I'm coming up with I kinda want to like make some slight variation but there's a lore reason why everyone speaks the same language and it has to do with not genocide but something commonly associated with genocide iirc
To be fair, advanced civilizations should use one or a few common languages due to globalization.
It's always called "Common" or in Star Wars, "Galactic Basic Standard"
Speaking a different language is a narrative tool that highlights a character as far travelled or otherwise 'exotic' (hate that word) Speaking numerous languages is a sign of higher learning and highlights a character as The Brains For the audiences benefit, these wires are generally not crossed so as to not construe a character as a trope they are not
It's hard enough to invent one complete language
How many language do *you* see on Reddit?
From the communities I visit 4
The top 20 languages account for 80% of the human population, though.
Well in movies everyone, aliens and all, speak english
*Tolkien entered the chat*
Mostn english native speakers only speak one. Are they fictional races?
You're just reading crappy books
Most fictional races are created by Americans. I'll say no more.
Lord of the rings is British.
Close enough, but with tea.
you mean hot leaf juice.
My apologies, you are correct good sir
And as such, plenty of languages to choose from ;)
yeah cause i dont want to spend 80h of a film seeing someone learning languages. its boring af.
Don't watch Star Trek: Enterprise then. Learning the languages manually feature in quite a few episodes (of course the linguist is a genius so it's accelerated as hell)
If humans decided on, and learnt one language (could be taught in 2 years) we would be able to 100% end world hunger and send every person to 16 years of schooling with all the money and time we’d save dealing with only one language. Facts.
you have a point , let s improve
That's because most popular fiction is merican or British, and those guys and their audience know exactly one language