Previously: Fantasy Language Review: Delver Cant, Tremorspeak, Lyrical Language, and Shouting at the Smallfolk
Gnomish
Continuing the “oops, all dwarvish script” theme, we reach Gnomish as the next “standard” language.
Variations: A dwarf by any other name… Gnomes, like giants, use dwarvish script for writing, but we don’t have to jump through any linguistic hoops to explain why. They’re just dwarves. The idea of a “gnomish” language is just a misnomer (a misgnomer?) among humans and other tallfolk. Gnomish is just another dialect of dwarvish.
An alternative approach: Mechanical minds. If anything distinguishes gnomes from dwarves, it is the idea that they are mechanical tinkerers, either in the (relatively) restrained presentation we get in D&D 5E, or in the full-send steampunk version present in World of Warcraft and other media. If we want to separate them from dwarves, give them a language that is as much math as words, inextricably intermingled with artifice and machine-craft.
Get weirder: Conlag culture. Gnomes are known for their restless reinvention, right? To the other civilizations, it probably seems like their love of tinkering goes too far, and they invent things just for the sake of invention. Take that to its logical conclusion, and portray each Gnomish dialect as a language created by a particular culture of gnomes as an expression of their own creativity and inventiveness.
Goblin
Variations: Warrenspeak. Goblins typically live in twisting, cramped tunnels, surrounded by giant rats and dire wolves. Goblins don’t treat these animals as pets or working animals so much as equal members of their warren. In this treatment, the goblin language is filled with howls, chittering, barks, and other animal noises, and goblins are halfway fluent in those animal languages.
An alternative approach: Unseemly unseelies. The dwarvish script issue puts goblins as downstream of dwarvish culture, and a lot of fantasy fiction pits them as natural enemies. But a fairy-tale treatment of goblins (from folklore up through the Labyrinth movie) views them more as trickster spirits, members of the dark fey court. Switch their script to Elvish and you’re off to the races.
Get weirder: Every word, precious and stolen. In both folklore and D&D, goblins are characterized as thieves. Why not apply it to language as well? Their entire tongue is made of words that a trickster-deity, in the olden days, stole from other languages. This is not a form of strict mimicry, like kenku; these goblin words literally no longer exist in their parent languages. Other creatures scoff at this idea as mere myth, but the etymological evidence is surprisingly robust…
Halfling
Apropos of nothing, did you know that when Magic: The Gathering released its Lord of the Rings set, they categorized the hobbits as halflings? MTG had already done halflings as part of a previous D&D set, and they decided to just group hobbits into the same category, rather than creating a separate creature type for something so similar. I love that 50 years after the Tolkien estate cease-and-desisted Gygax into rebranding his smallfolk, we come full circle, and Bilbo gets halfling-pilled. Anyway, about that halfling language…
Variations: Honorary humans. Halfing is the only language besides common that uses the common script. Isn’t that strange? Seeing as how common is so… common, we would expect more languages to use it. Halflings are just “slacker humans” anyway – per the 2014 PHB, “Humans are a lot like us.” So a simple solution is just to have them speak particular dialects of common, just like humans. They could have invented their own language, but that would have been an awful bother, and their human neighbors have a perfectly nice language they’re willing to share!
An alternative approach: Polite polyglots. Expand on the above idea. Perhaps halflings, as much gracious guests as they are helpful hosts, speak whatever language is predominant in the area where they settle. Many speak common, because humans are the most, uh, common neighbors they might have. But not all communities do. A community of halflings speaking a weird language like grell or giant elk would present quite a linguistic puzzle if none of the accompany monsters were found nearby.
Get weirder: The folk under the floorboards. Why do they speak common? Why are they so comfortable in human civilization? Perhaps halflings just sort of appear in civilized places, like house spirits, mending shoes and sweeping rooms. In a tolerant place with good food on offer, they gradually just instantiate into physical beings, showing up one day acting like they’ve always been here… because they have.
Orc
Why just “orc” for the language name? Why is 5E so inconsistent with the “ish” suffix? Anyway, Tolkien again casts a long shadow here, as orcs, like goblins, use dwarvish script.
Variations: Putting the pig back in pig latin. We have an easy solution available if we choose to solve the Evil Humanoid Problem by treating orcs as a subversions of other ancestries (like undead or aberrations) rather than treating them like a culture or ethnicity that should be understood in a similar way to real-world people. With this approach, their use of dwarvish script makes sense. These porcine minions might be variously descended from corrupted surface dwellers of all kinds, but dwarvish is the script they use because it is the most common written language available in the dungeons, caves, and other subterranean spaces they now occupy.
An alternative approach: Just following orders. If orcs were created for war, uruk-hai style, language would be part of that. Orcish would be like a stripped-down version of its creator’s language, something like a series of call signs, exhortations, and barks from a military shooter.
Get weirder: Chaos manifested. If the previous idea strays too close to hobgoblins in D&D’s crowded collection of intelligent enemy bipeds, we can steer orcs in the other direction. Orcs are not frightening because they can fight, or want to fight, but because they must fight. They raid civilization not so much because they need resources, but because the very idea of civilization is a fundamental offense to them. Their language reflects this. It sounds like gibberish to the untrained ear, but those who learn to speak it see it as an anti-logic, like a record played backwards to reveal satanic messages. Their language is a mockery and a rejection of every word of common, elvish, and dwarvish ever uttered.
Next time: Fantasy Language Review: Demons, Devas, Dragons, Derp Speech
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