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
    22·
    16 hours ago

    You might tell your DM to look up Sabir, where the term Lingua Franca came from, the “Frankish tongue” which wasn’t really from the Franks.

    This is where the idea of a common language comes from. Sabir was a simplified pidgin mix of Mediterranean languages so traders could communicate. They still spoke fine but didn’t conjugate verbs, used Me/you a lot without different forms (myself, I, yourself, them, they, etc).

    Sabir was a Mediterranean lingua franca, then Latin for 1500 years throughout Europe. Now it’s English. The idea of Common in D&D comes from Westron or “the Common tongue” in LotR which D&D was heavily inspired from, which was basically written by Tolkien so that his constructed languages had a reason to exist. He was a scholar of languages, and the idea of a common tongue comes from actual history. He wasn’t just making it up. Something like that would likely exist in a Fantasy world with lots of trade.