Previously: Mapping the Fantasy Languages – How and Why
Common
Common is pretty obviously a solution to a gameplay problem rather than a worldbuilding detail that emerges naturally from the fiction. The party members need to talk to each other and the game designers don’t want every session devolving into frantic pantomime. Can we do better?
Variations: Dialects. Fantasy games have a bad habit of suggesting that human nations have cultures that vary just as much as they do in the real world… yet these cultures speak the same common language. Use the close and familiar gaps (defined in the last post) to articulate dialect differences. Human languages don’t just have to be limited to people from far-off places. Two towns separated by a handful of miles of difficult geography may have very different languages; it certainly happens in the real world.
An alternative approach: Delver cant. Common is a lingua franca, but as real-world lingua franca was used by groups who needed it for their profession (e.g., traveling merchants) fantasy lingua franca would not be the common language of, uh, commoners, but rather adventurers. This means the party can easily talk to each other, but they can’t necessarily communicate with every Tom, Dick, and Harpy they encounter on their travels. Bonus points if the players want to invent their own slang, unique to just their group.
Get weirder: Memo-virus. Use Noise Sans Signal’s idea of common as a memetic virus (this idea is very Snow Crash).
Dwarvish
Dwarves and their ancient language are a familiar part of the common fantasy vernacular, and their written script (often flavored as runes) appears a lot in the game. We'll revisit Dwarvish script in some of the following entries in this series, as D&D uses it a lot.
Variations: Mountain homes. There’s no particular reason that dwarves should have any more lingual unanimity than humans. Rather than tying their language to nation states, like most fantasy human languages, perhaps each range of mountains has its own Dwarven tongue. Dwarven adventurers exploring a mountain home that was completely abandoned (like Moria) might need to navigate a close or familiar language gap.
An alternative approach: Terran dialect. One way to tap deeper into the mythic nature of dwarves, and get them away from the bad Scottish accent cliche, is to tie their language directly to the capital-E earth; make Dwarvish and the elemental earth language Terran related languages, so dwarves are not just those who dwell in the earth, but those who descended from it.
Get weirder: Tremorspeak. Take the above idea one step further. Who says Dwarves have to speak their language in a conventionally verbal manner? Instead they could communicate through complex vibrations and tapping; a tactile language formed deep underground. This opens up all kinds of interesting opportunities for non-verbal communication, subterfuge, and strategy.
Elvish
Vanilla fantasy typically posits Elvish as the other very ancient language among humanoids, besides Dwarvish.
Variations: A tongue for every terrain. Many real-world languages have different tenses and word choices for different social settings. A person speaking their language to immediate family members may sound completely different from how they sound when at work, or speaking to a stranger, or participating in a religious ritual. Consider giving elves dialects that vary based on the place where they are. PCs may be surprised to find that the elf who is perfectly grokkable in the streets of the human city speaks a difficult-to-understand dialect when deep in the forest.
An alternative approach: Sylvan cousins. The Elvish language itself is a descendant of the Sylvan tongue. Elvish brings rigor and structure to a language that is famously mercurial when spoken in the fey lands. This complexity is not arbitrary. It holds back the inherent chaos of the mother tongue, allowing elves to maintain the connection to unadulterated magic and the natural world, without succumbing to the satyr’s bacchalia, the abandon of the Wild Hunt, or any other manifestation of Sylvan chaos. “You’re speaking Sylvan'' is an Elvish expression suggesting that someone is saying something irrational.
Get weirder: Musical meaning. Most lore about elves suggests a propensity toward art and music. Why not make it explicit, and make their language musical? Elves literally speak in metered prose or loose, interwoven melodies. This doesn’t mean that elven PCs have to constrain how they speak or come up with song-speeches (although an ambitious PC absolutely should feel welcome). It’s more just a way to drive home an alien or foreign language gap.
Giant
D&D 5E treats Giant as one of the "standard" languages, even though the lore suggests Giant is older than any other language besides Draconic. We’ll interrogate that contradiction in our treatment.
Variations: Planar fugitives. If giants trace their origin to other planes of existence, then their languages could reflect this. Fire giants can speak Ignan, of course, but we should avoid just slapping elemental affinities on everything; elements are already overused in D&D's cosmology. Perhaps some of the connections are less obvious. If stone giants don’t speak Terran, but instead speak a language of the Dreamlands, isn’t that more interesting? If cloud giants are cagey about their native tongue and refuse to speak it in front of outsiders, doesn’t that create an interesting mystery behind these tricksters?
An alternative approach: Bound by the word. Why do the giants use dwarven script? They are among the oldest creatures, peers to dragons. Shouldn’t they have their own script? Perhaps in mythic times, they had a spoken language, but no writing. The Monster Manual seems to at least suggest this would be a reasonable inference; in one aside, the 5E book notes that fire giants “work through insight and experience rather than writing or arithmetic.” Perhaps in that mythic pre-history, when the giants were more common, they had no need to write. One day, a clever dwarven smith came to the king of the giants and asked to learn the ways of the giant metalworkers. The haughty giant king scoffed, asking what the dwarves could possibly offer in return that would equal the value of this rare knowledge. The dwarf said that his people had a form of “magic” that could compel armies to battle or stop kingdoms in their tracks; "magic" that would make warlords weep and turn modest maidens into military marauders. The “magic” was, of course, writing, and ever since that day, dwarves have known the ways of the giant smiths, and giants have written in dwarven script.
Get weirder: Deafening declarations. A giant’s size can be hard to communicate in a TTRPG. So many other D&D monsters are very large, so the idea of the giant as “really big bearded guy” can lack narrative oomph. It helps for the DM to channel the giant’s size into something besides just a height measurement and commiserate strength score. Imagine a giant who whispers and is still so loud that her voice shatters glass. Imagine giants reveling in the mountains, with the echoes audible hundreds of miles away. It is difficult to parse their language simply because it is so loud. Massive lung capacity can really play up the true size of a giant. Wouldn't it be more evocative if a cloud giant was literally blowing a PC over with a sneeze, rather than the boilerplate X/day wind and weather spells from the PHB?
Next time: Fantasy Language Review: Building, Stealing, Adopting, and Conquering Words