The venerable Players Handbook from TSR spends eight paragraphs on the subject of Character Languages, and I’m afraid it makes something of a muddle.
Following long-standing fantasy protocol, they imagine a “common tongue”, spoken “by all states in the central campaign area”. In addition, “all intelligent creatures able to converse in speech use special languages particular to their alignment.”
Additional languages are imagined as being the “professional languages” of druids and thieves, and various racial languages.
What was Gygax thinking?
To be fair, most Americans have only a passing familiarity with the fact that other languages exist, and how they work. (This is less true than when the author was a younger man, but it still persists.) Language, in fact, is somewhat mystical and magical, both obscuring and revealing knowledge and intent.
Implied in the existence of the “alignment languages”, language can be understood to reflect worldview or culture, but this understanding is very shaky. In fact, all languages reflect worldview and culture, and this is one of the things that make translation difficult.
The system starts with the assumption that even the most unintelligent, IQ 30 character will speak two languages comprehensibly at the beginning of the game. Starting at IQ 80 a character can learn a third language, and a staggeringly intelligent IQ 180 character can learn a total of 9 languages, including the two he started with.
This is not reasonable. I know a man in central Africa who speaks 12 languages reasonably well. While I’m willing to grant that he is very intelligent, it is experience and (dare I say it?) a linguistic “gift” that permits him this.
The Common Tongue
Let’s start with the idea of a “common tongue”. In the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, the Common Tongue was understood to be a degraded version of the language of Númenor, spread throughout the various realms of Middle Earth during the ascendance of that kingdom, and then through the efforts of the twin kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor.
The obvious reference in the “real world” would be medieval Latin, the shreds of the language of Rome that infused the nations of Europe after the fall of that empire. So, what can we glean from this?
Although medieval Latin was “spoken” throughout Europe, even the lineal descendants of the Romans, the Italians, began to speak Italian in their homes instead of Latin. In France, a new language sprang up that united Latin with the germanic Frankish language, and similarly in Spain, Portugal, and Romania. However, even in far-off lands like Wales, there were remnants of the Latin language that infused the vocabulary of these far-off barbarians while leaving the grammar untouched.
In short, the “common language” of Europe was such primarily because commonality was not a characteristic of European languages after the fall of Rome. Languages flourished like weeds in the verges of the Roman roads, and most villages would contain at least a dozen people who could converse in three or four of these languages. Latin remained the one language comprehensible throughout (and beyond) the former imperial verges, but a crowd of other languages jostled for place therewithin.
Alignment Languages
Ironically, this same idea is expressed in D&D under the heading of “alignment tongue”. Historically, the only analogue to an alignment tongue would be the Latin of the European church, the Greek of the eastern church, the Arabic of the muslim world, the Sanskrit of the hindu world, etc.
The idea that a character will lose all ability to speak in his or her alignment tongue immediately upon changing alignment is odd. Admitting that we are discussing a magical world, where anything is possible, I can understand if this is intended to be a mystical, magical language. However, I feel this isn’t appropriate.
Additionally, how do we understand this in reference to the different “faiths” possible in D&D. For example, a priest who follows a Lawful Good deity must either be Lawful Good, himself, or Lawful Neutral or Neutral Good. However, we’re discussing a pretty wide range of thought, here, from Lawful Neutral through Lawful Good, to Neutral Good.
There may not be a way to properly solve this problem, but in our campaign I’ve settled on the following usage:
- Alignment languages can be used as a secret code/recognition cypher between characters. I have allowed my players to use Lawful Good as a way to encode information way too many times to walk it back now.
- Alignment languages, particularly with regard to close alignments, can be understood as regional dialect variants, rather than completely incomprehensible languages. Thus, a Calvinist, an Arminian, and a Catholic can have a discussion around the term of grace, and as long as they understand that they fundamentally mean different things by the term, can have a productive conversation. The moment the Calvinist forgets that the Catholic means something different by grace, the Calvinist will lose the ability to understand what the Catholic is saying.
This doesn’t have game-play significance for us, especially in light of #1 above, but it does explain how a shift in alignment necessarily involves a shift in alignment language. Atonement that involves the blood sacrifice of animals, and “the blood of bulls and goats can never take away sin” are so far apart that although the one word atonement is used, it’s in many ways not up to the task. - The Assassin is the only class able to learn and communicate in an alignment language other than his own. We explain this in that the Assassin learns to say what provokes a particular response, rather than worrying about the specific meaning that is being conveyed. An Assassin who began to understand a good-aligned language might be forced into a struggle over his alignment, as his thoughts would begin to condemn him.
A refusal to take this too seriously is the primary way in which we’ve preserved gameplay with this particular subject.
So, what about Mother Tongues?
In my campaign (set in the Old School “World of Greyhawk”) each locality is assumed to have its own language which is largely both a variant of the regional language, and an inheritor of the local ethnic groups.
Our current campaign group is composed of characters from Keoland and the Principality and County of Ulek. (There is also one non-player character who is Bakluni.) They all speak the “Common Tongue”, which is a variant of Oeridian made popular by the former spread of the Great Kingdom. Its use in trade makes it ubiquitous, even in Keoland, which was never under the authority of the Great Kingdom. In addition, they all speak Keoish, the “widespread dialect of Old High Oeridian with local admixtures”. At times, they will use Keoish terms while speaking Common, just because of their familiarity with both languages, and the common roots.
Several of the characters are demi-humans, and also speak Elvish, Halfling, etc. The character from the Principality of Ulek, though human, has a smattering of Dwarfish phrases and expressions, since the Prince of Ulek is a Dwarf.
All of the local dialects spoken by the characters contain Sueloise expressions or loan-words, and those with human ancestry all look Sueloise. They are not able to understand people who speak in a completely Sueloise language (like one of the Barbarian languages), but they would be able to catch occasional words, and likely divine intent. (Although they might also misunderstand a faux-ami and make a hilarious misunderstanding.
Our previous party was largely from the Grand Duchy of Geoff. Since that is a land of Oeridian management and Flannish population, I made the general Geoffite dialect most like the Oeridian-descended Common Tongue, but there are local Flannish expressions, and all of the characters can handle themselves in the market in Flannish. They might be at the level of my former night-watchman who informed me one evening, “He wants water.” When I asked, “Who?”, he replied, “Water.” Not fluent, but able to be understood.
In short, in my Flanaess, most people who travel outside of their own village, or who speak to travelers, speak at least three languages. (Village idiots are practically defined as those who only speak their “mother tongue”.) People who live in heterogeneous areas (one character was from near the Hornwood, which contains large numbers of elves. He couldn’t speak elvish, but he could recognize it, and could probably exchange greetings in elvish) will inevitably pick up words, expressions, and phrases, especially common things like greetings and numbers.
Extinct languages, like Sueloise, are still present in their many offspring, and it is possible for people who have no other common language to exchange simple thoughts using the common vocabulary, provided it hasn’t changed too drastically in the intervening centuries.
Adventurers are pretty focused on their missions, and don’t spend a lot of time hanging out in the tavern trying to learn to speak the local language. As such, the time limits (six months of work and practice) are much more confining for language learning than the intelligence limits.