The fantasy trope that everyone of a given species shares the same language always seemed a bit funny to me.

Co-author credit on this comic to my daughter, who came up with the concept. (She makes a lot of comics about dragons, but she’s too young to share them publicly.)

  • terranoid@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    21·
    14 hours ago

    As much as people think having “Common” as a language is weird, it literally has historical roots:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

    People have been using a Common language for millenia. Today, the global lingua franca is obviously English. For about 1500 years, the lingua franca of medieval Europe was Latin. And for a while in the Mediterranean it was Sabir, where Lingua Franca the term came from, which was a weird simplified Mediterranean mix of languages (no verb conjugation, etc).

    Other areas with multiple languages have had their own Lingua Francas. It’s a common thing to happen if you have big areas with multiple languages and lots of trade.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lingua_francas

    So it’s really not weird to have a Common tongue in games. It came from LotR which came from history since Tolkien was a huge language nerd and wrote a world for his language to exist.