Hopping Mad about Language Skills!

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Dear Abby,

I don't like the way languages work in any RPG that isn't set on Earth. Let's look at D&D because that's what everyone copies. Most of the languages are racial things like "Goblin" or "Dwarven" where all goblins speak the same language even if their cultures haven't been in contact for thousands of years. The people across the border don't speak a different language unless they're a different species. You never run into the village on the other side of the mountain where they speak a different language that's close enough to yours that you can sort of understand each other but everyone has to talk slowly.

Common is supposed to be a "trade language" and if you actually tried to follow that you wouldn't be able to communicate more than simple concepts. A trade language is the shit you learn in Semester 1 of a foreign language class. I am currently hyper aware of how limiting this is because virtually all of my in-person conversations now involve me speaking broken Spanish or someone else speaking limited English. I can say thinks like "Another beer please" ("uno mas cerveza por favor") or "Here is my passport, officer" ("tengo una bolsa de cocaína en el culo") but if you asked me to tell jokes or formulate battlefield tactics I would be useless. If you went by the book you couldn't have the conversations people have in RPGs.

It's even weirder in space opera settings where there's no "it's magic lol" to fall back on. The book just occasionally says the words "Universal Translator" and then moves on as if embarrassed. Nobody wants to talk about how what limitations or vulnerabilities this supposedly ubiquitous device might have.

Obviously, nobody wants to give up the ability to talk to other characters in the name of realizarms, and that's 100% fine. So why should RPGs make half-assed unsatisfactory nods to realism in the first place? Why not say language works differently because it's a fantasy world? It can reflect literary tropes and how people actually play. You could say that everyone has the in-born ability to speak Common which starts to manifest at 1 year old or so. You have to practice to learn grammar and sentence structure, and there are still minor genetic and cultural variations. So instead of hill giants speaking Giant and dwarves speaking Dwarf, you have hill giants speaking caveman-speak and dwarves speaking in Scottish accents. If you want actual esoteric or dead languages you could still do that. Maybe the language everyone is born with mutates over time, or demon Dark Speech is still a different thing (they speak Common to communicate with mortals without making them bleed from the eyeballs). But you can talk to the lizardfolk on the remote island without handwaving, or stopping the game to see if the wizard randomly took Lizardfolk as one of his bonus Int languages.

I love your column Abby and I hope you respond.
Sincerely,
-Hopping Mad in Wisconsin

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Fortunately, nobody gives a flying fuck about different languages in Pokemon, and every Pokemon can speak with every other Pokemon somehow. The only sticking point is human-pokemon communication, which is more fun if you can't completely understand them anyway.
I think the issue is one of perspective. 99% of the time, most people do not give a shit about what language they're speaking as long as other characters can understand then and respond in a halfway recognizable manner.

[Thaluikhain]

Dragon Warriors, while not set on Earth, is set on a world like Earth, so there's lots of different languages around. At least in Book6, the last book, where they deal with that, which also reveals that some of the places previously scenarios were set had different languages, meaning your PCs most likely should not been able to speak both languages. Or, possibly either language. Or, unlikely but still possibly any language spoken by any other PC. The scenario in Book 6 starts off several countries and thus several languages away for more shenanigans. Not great at all.

The idea of everyone speaking the same language, because magi, also isn't really a great one, but works. Edgar Rice Burroughs said Barsoom has that going on (different writing systems, though), and in his other works people just learn languages really fast.

So instead of hill giants speaking Giant and dwarves speaking Dwarf, you have hill giants speaking caveman-speak and dwarves speaking in Scottish accents.

Errrrrrm...yes, but handle with care. If you are using accents from the real world for monsters, you can't avoid equating the people using those accents with monsters. People make this mistake all the time.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Errrrrrm...yes, but handle with care. If you are using accents from the real world for monsters, you can't avoid equating the people using those accents with monsters. People make this mistake all the time.

I think I'm talking about just dwarves here. (And not gully dwarves, because fuck Dragonlance, unless that comedy accent is supposed to be hillbilly and not gullah, in which case still fuck Dragonlance.) I can't think of any other D&D race that's associated with a very specific real-world accent.

Ok, back when I actually ran D&D games, hobgoblins sounded like Joe Pesci. I don't know why, they just did.

[Thaluikhain]

Errrrrrm...yes, but handle with care. If you are using accents from the real world for monsters, you can't avoid equating the people using those accents with monsters. People make this mistake all the time.

I think I'm talking about just dwarves here. (And not gully dwarves, because fuck Dragonlance, unless that comedy accent is supposed to be hillbilly and not gullah, in which case still fuck Dragonlance.) I can't think of any other D&D race that's associated with a very specific real-world accent.

Ok, back when I actually ran D&D games, hobgoblins sounded like Joe Pesci. I don't know why, they just did.

If it's just dwarves and a stereotypical Scottish accent, fair enough. Though, presumably you've got lots of other races, what do you do with them?

[WalkTheDin0saur]

I wasn't imagining every race having a special speech pattern or anything. My point was why not just have them all speak the same language since that seems to be what everyone wants to do in practice.

I mean, if you wanted to do like a sibilant hissing voice for lizard men or a growly voice for minotaurs or whatever you could still do that.

[Orca]

Saying that there are no languages other than English (or exactly one local stand-in) hammers my friends belief in the world. Trying to elide the problem one way or another is probably less damaging to that belief. In the current game I'm running there's sleep-teaching before most missions to avoid the obvious problems that not speaking the local lingo would create, teaching the characters that dialect temporarily. Occasionally there are problems with that when I want such to be a focus of the mission - not often.

[Stahlseele]

The other side of the coin is, again, Shadowrun.
There is a skill for every last single language you can think of.
And a few more. With specializations too. So, where is the middle ground you are looking for?

[angelfromanotherpin]

World Tree did something like this. Common is something every living creature is born knowing, even if they aren't smart enough to use it, or have the mouth parts to pronounce it. But Common sucks: it has a very small vocabulary, only uses the present tense, and so on. So there are a huge number of regional languages, which are all based on Common, but differing from each other about as much as the Romance languages. When you encounter a new language, you roll the Linguistics skill to see if you can figure out how to communicate well or if you have to fall back on Tarzan-speak.

It's not a bad model. It removes the chance for total incomprehensibility, while retaining the fun of sometimes having to yell slowly at foreigners.

[Emerald]

Common is supposed to be a "trade language" and if you actually tried to follow that you wouldn't be able to communicate more than simple concepts. A trade language is the shit you learn in Semester 1 of a foreign language class.

[...]

Why not say language works differently because it's a fantasy world? It can reflect literary tropes and how people actually play. You could say that everyone has the in-born ability to speak Common which starts to manifest at 1 year old or so.

World Tree did something like this. Common is something every living creature is born knowing, even if they aren't smart enough to use it, or have the mouth parts to pronounce it.

This actually is how Common works in D&D already.

Like, various setting material will say that Common is merely a "trade language," but this obviously can't be true because:

1a) Common is spoken by basically every creature on the Material Plane. A handful of creatures can't speak at all (e.g. Phase Spiders), only speak their own language (e.g. Blink Dogs), or only speak a non-Common language (e.g. Trolls speak only Giant), but 95% of the time, if it lives on the Material Plane, it speaks Common, from humanoids to Chuuls (who have no humanlike mouthparts) to Will-O'-Wisps (who live far from civilization and don't interact with any living beings except to kill them) to Gibbering Mouthers (who are literally insane and shouldn't be able to speak any normal language) and so on.

1b) Common is spoken by basically every Material Plane world. If you go through the Deep Ethereal from Toril to Oerth or spelljam your way from Toril to Krynn, the folks on the other end will be speaking the same Common you are (which we know is the case given the complete lack of any sort of "So you're on a new world that doesn't speak your language..." flavor or rules in either Planescape or Spelljammer). Common often has plenty of dialects within a given world, but it's still always the same Common between worlds.

2) Many creatures only speak Common. Humans, for instance, have Common as their sole language known barring bonus languages, so unless one wants to posit that every human commoner with Int 10 is not actually fluent in any language at all and is merely first-semester-Spanish-ing their way through life, Common has to be a full-on language.

3) Common doesn't act as a trade language (as trade languages tend to be localized to a specific region, nation, social context, etc.), it acts as a normal language that just spread across the world, like modern English is for Earth. Common and its many Torillian and Oeridian dialects is much more like English with its American vs. British vs. Australian vs. Indian vs. ... native dialects than it is like a collection of pidgins and creoles that you'd expect to see if dwarves and giants were making a trade language over here and elves and halflings were making a trade language over there and so on.

4) The origin stories for Common in a given world point to them having a single common (heh) origin, rather than arising separately and naturally as trade languages. For instance, Torillian Common supposedly comes from a "pidgin variant of Old Chondathan and Alzhedo" but Old Chondathan is literally described as Common with fancier grammar and Alzhedo is already a mix of Common and Auran, so saying that Common is a pidgin of Common-with-added-rules and Common-with-added vocabulary just makes it...Common. Same with Oeridian Common being a cross between Old Oeridian and Ancient Baklunish which are mutually intelligible with Common and each other and hard to translate to non-Common-derived languages, the two major Eberronian "Commons" being explicitly Common+Quori and Common+Gnomish, and so on.

So...yeah. Ignore the bit about Common being a trade language 'cause it's not one, problem solved.

Most of the languages are racial things like "Goblin" or "Dwarven" where all goblins speak the same language even if their cultures haven't been in contact for thousands of years. The people across the border don't speak a different language unless they're a different species. You never run into the village on the other side of the mountain where they speak a different language that's close enough to yours that you can sort of understand each other but everyone has to talk slowly.

This makes sense when you remember that widely-separated cultures of the same race were still created by the same racial god (or racial pantheon) and usually still worship said creator(s). Sure, two goblin tribes may be two mountain ranges and a river valley apart from one another, but if they were created with innate knowledge of Goblin like they were with innate knowledge of Common, and they both worship Maglubiyet who most likely demands that prayers to him be in Goblin, then you're not going to see any significant linguistic drift.

Ironically, the "monstrous" races with more Chaotic- and/or Evil-leaning gods are likely going to see less linguistic drift than the "civilized" races with more Lawful- and/or Good-leaning gods, because if an elven city-state experiences a Great Vowel Shift and their prayers change then Corellon in his infinite mercy (and/or apathy) probably isn't going to care, but if a drow city starts badly mispronouncing the name of Lolth's favorite handmaiden due to unexpected rhotacization then they're probably going to get smote for their impudence.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Lot of really good points here, thanks for this.

[Prak]

Gibbering Mouthers (who are literally insane and shouldn't be able to speak any normal language) and so on.

I get what you mean, but as someone with multiple things going on with their mind and brain that would make an Iron Age culture consider them to be "completely insane" and who actually has a better grasp of language than their average countryperson... phrasing isn't great here.

1b) Common is spoken by basically every Material Plane world. If you go through the Deep Ethereal from Toril to Oerth or spelljam your way from Toril to Krynn, the folks on the other end will be speaking the same Common you are (which we know is the case given the complete lack of any sort of "So you're on a new world that doesn't speak your language..." flavor or rules in either Planescape or Spelljammer). Common often has plenty of dialects within a given world, but it's still always the same Common between worlds.

Not to mention the handful of adventures across the publishing history of D&D that have had adventurers from one Prime travel to another and have absolutely zero problem speaking to the people there (possibly including Boot Hill, implying that Common literally is English).

unless one wants to posit that every human commoner with Int 10 is not actually fluent in any language at all and is merely first-semester-Spanish-ing their way through life

That actually would be a pretty good bit for a comedy game... Maybe a with a little risk towards "unfortunate implications" but I do like the idea that Adventurers speak a full language, while Int 10 NPCs are stuck with "first semester spanish" language skills.

3) Common doesn't act as a trade language (as trade languages tend to be localized to a specific region, nation, social context, etc.), it acts as a normal language that just spread across the world, like modern English is for Earth. Common and its many Torillian and Oeridian dialects is much more like English with its American vs. British vs. Australian vs. Indian vs. ... native dialects than it is like a collection of pidgins and creoles that you'd expect to see if dwarves and giants were making a trade language over here and elves and halflings were making a trade language over there and so on.

For a specific setting, you could do something really interesting with this, as it sort of implies that Common may have started as a trade language, but grew into a full language, and then was spread across the plane by a conquering empire, that colonized a lot of the realm, and either still exists, or disappeared with its only traces being abandoned fortresses and towers (ie, dungeons) and the way it affected the cultures it conquered.

Ironically, the "monstrous" races with more Chaotic- and/or Evil-leaning gods are likely going to see less linguistic drift than the "civilized" races with more Lawful- and/or Good-leaning gods, because if an elven city-state experiences a Great Vowel Shift and their prayers change then Corellon in his infinite mercy (and/or apathy) probably isn't going to care, but if a drow city starts badly mispronouncing the name of Lolth's favorite handmaiden due to unexpected rhotacization then they're probably going to get smote for their impudence.

Well, that or Lolth is going to tell her favorite handmaiden "Huh, I like this pronunciation. That's your name now." I mean, she is capricious like that.

[hogarth]

The other side of the coin is, again, Shadowrun.
There is a skill for every last single language you can think of.
And a few more. With specializations too. So, where is the middle ground you are looking for?

The most elaborate language skill system I've seen in an RPG is from the Hero System sourcebook "The Golden Age of Champions". It had a graph showing relationships among (real-life) language families and it had a system so that if you had (say) 4 points of proficiency in English, you would have 2 points of proficiency in Frisian and 1 point of proficiency in French (for instance).

[Emerald]

Gibbering Mouthers (who are literally insane and shouldn't be able to speak any normal language) and so on.

I get what you mean, but as someone with multiple things going on with their mind and brain that would make an Iron Age culture consider them to be "completely insane" and who actually has a better grasp of language than their average countryperson... phrasing isn't great here.

I mean, there's a difference between "Iron Age commoners would think it's crazy," which would apply to most modern people regardless of personal quirks, and "it's a nightmare creature that's barely sapient, only speaks in gibberish, and drives anyone hearing it speak temporarily insane", which is the case with the Gibbering X line of monsters. But I do see your point.

Not to mention the handful of adventures across the publishing history of D&D that have had adventurers from one Prime travel to another and have absolutely zero problem speaking to the people there (possibly including Boot Hill, implying that Common literally is English).

Well, maybe. There's "Earth" as in the real world and then there's "Earth" as in one of the parallel worlds of Oerth (along with Aerth, Urth, and Yarth) where Masque of the Red Death and other "like historical Earth, but magic and gods and such are real" adventures and mini-settings are set. Boot Hill (and later Gamma World) could be set on that Earth, and for all we know that had Common rather than English as its lingua franca (lingua anglais?) all along.

Personally, when I ran a game where my group took a jaunt to actual-real-world-not-Greyhawk Earth, I posited that Earth was in a sealed crystal sphere like Athas and Eberron, and those were the only worlds physically and metaphysically isolated enough from the rest of the multiverse for their local Common to diverge enough to be considered a different language...and the result of that divergence on Earth is what we Earthlings know as the Proto-Indo-European language.

The most elaborate language skill system I've seen in an RPG is from the Hero System sourcebook "The Golden Age of Champions". It had a graph showing relationships among (real-life) language families and it had a system so that if you had (say) 4 points of proficiency in English, you would have 2 points of proficiency in Frisian and 1 point of proficiency in French (for instance).

The "Speaking in Tongues" article in Dragon Magazine Annual 1999 did something like that for the Torillian regional languages, organizing languages into groups and subgroups by region and setting various Nonweapon Proficiency slot costs for learning to speak and read each language or group of languages.

I don't know anyone who's actually used the system (not least because I only found the article after switching to 3e), but flavor-wise it's very useful, as it gives some details about various languages to help in using them in game (e.g. there's a "Trade Pidgin" in the Central Thorassic language family that is explicitly not Common, the Imaskari languages sound vaguely Turkish, and so on), and confirms the "nonhuman languages don't drift" thing for Faerûn: "Oddly, the languages of most non-human races differ only in their dialect despite their regional location and distance from one another. Some sages believe that this homogeny among nonhuman languages is an expression of the divine might of the nonhuman gods. Others scoff at this theory."

[Prak]

Gibbering Mouthers (who are literally insane and shouldn't be able to speak any normal language) and so on.

I get what you mean, but as someone with multiple things going on with their mind and brain that would make an Iron Age culture consider them to be "completely insane" and who actually has a better grasp of language than their average countryperson... phrasing isn't great here.

I mean, there's a difference between "Iron Age commoners would think it's crazy," which would apply to most modern people regardless of personal quirks, and "it's a nightmare creature that's barely sapient, only speaks in gibberish, and drives anyone hearing it speak temporarily insane", which is the case with the Gibbering X line of monsters. But I do see your point.

Yeah, basically I'm saying "the gibbering mouther isn't insane (itself not a great term), it's alien chaos incarnate." And as much as might kind of like to be alien chaos incarnate... Anyway. Yeah, you saw my point. All good.

Personally, when I ran a game where my group took a jaunt to actual-real-world-not-Greyhawk Earth, I posited that Earth was in a sealed crystal sphere like Athas and Eberron, and those were the only worlds physically and metaphysically isolated enough from the rest of the multiverse for their local Common to diverge enough to be considered a different language...and the result of that divergence on Earth is what we Earthlings know as the Proto-Indo-European language.

And now I'm just thinking "something something crystal spheres like ancient metaphysical philosophy posited, then Earth's shattered, and that's where the magic went (because, unlike atmosphere, gravity alone can't hold in magic, so when the sphere went away, the magic wasn't being held in anymore)" as an in-setting explanation for a "disappeared, reappearing magic" thing. Like, if there was magic, and it was held in, then that magic came from somewhere and either it's like oxygen, in that it is produced by something, and that production has always been a thing, it just didn't stick around, and that's how we get random unexplained shit, and maybe people figure out where it comes from, or the magic was some kind of finite resource, given by, iunno, simple answer is a god, and they've come back around and said "what the fuck happened!? *sigh* here, here's a new sphere, and new magic, don't fuck this one up!"

[Longes2]

I'm willing to point finger at surface reading of Lord of the Rings as a big culprit for "common/elven/orc languages". The framing device of LotR is that we are reading a book reading in-universe by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam, and translated to us into English by Tolkien. And that translation obscures a lot of linguistic work going under the hood.

The "common" of Middle-Earth is the language called "Westron", which was the primary language of the kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor, as well as Umbar. Hobbits speak a dialect of Westron, and the orc language is also a dialect of Westron, so orcs and humans can kinda understand each other. The Red Book, of which LotR is a translation of, is written in Westron.

Sauron has artificially designed Black Speech based off of Valarin, which is the language of the Valar. Black Speech was intended to be the official language of Sauron's servants, but orcs speak fucking Westron, and didn't pick up Black Speech willingly. So in the end only Sauron, Nazguls, and Balrogs speak "real" Black Speech, and orcs speak Westron and a pidgin variant of Black Speech mixed with Westron.

Other nations of men have different languages. Rohirim speak Rohiric, Haradrim have their own language family, as do Dunledings and many others.

Dwarven language Kuzdul is literally divinely designed for them, so it had very few historic changes, and other races have trouble learning it. So Dwarves instead learn Westron for diplomatic missions and trade.

Elves have three linguistic families, with regional dialects.
Teleri is the language of the Telerin elves who came to Valinor, and is largely absent from Middle-Earth.
Quenya is the language of non-Telerin elves who came to Valinor, and was brought back to Middle-Earth by the Noldor during the Silmaril affair. Quenya has a writing system designed by Feanor, which other elven languages don't have.
Sindarin is the main elven language, and it's the language of the elves who didn't travel to Valinor.

[Thaluikhain]

The "common" of Middle-Earth is the language called "Westron", which was the primary language of the kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor, as well as Umbar. Hobbits speak a dialect of Westron, and the orc language is also a dialect of Westron, so orcs and humans can kinda understand each other. The Red Book, of which LotR is a translation of, is written in Westron.

I might be remembering it incorrectly, or remembering correctly something written by someone who was incorrect, but didn't orcs have different orc languages, but spoke Westron as well so different groups of orcs could communicate?

But yeah, "blame Tolkien" is always a safe bet.

Though Burroughs was doing something like it (rather more superficially) much earlier. According to him, IIRC, all large apes (except humans and some near humans) on the surface of the Earth, or under the surface of the Earth spoke the same language, which Tarzan, of course, could also speak.

[Longes2]

I might be remembering it incorrectly, or remembering correctly something written by someone who was incorrect, but didn't orcs have different orc languages, but spoke Westron as well so different groups of orcs could communicate?

Kinda.

Orcs and the Black Speech. Orc is the form of the name that other races had for this foul people as it was in the language of Rohan. In Sindarin it was orch. Related, no doubt, was the word uruk of the Black Speech, though this was applied as a rule only to the great soldier-orcs that at this time issued from Mordor and Isengard. The lesser kinds were called, especially by the Uruk-hai, snaga ‘slave’.

The Orcs were first bred by the Dark Power of the North in the Elder Days. It is said that they had no language of their own, but took what they could of other tongues and perverted it to their own liking; yet they made only brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient even for their own needs, unless it were for curses and abuse. And these creatures, being filled with malice, hating even their own kind, quickly developed as many barbarous dialects as there were groups or settlements of their race, so that their Orkish speech was of little use to them in intercourse between different tribes.

So it was that in the Third Age Orcs used for communication between breed and breed the Westron tongue; and many indeed of the older tribes, such as those that still lingered in the North and in the Misty Mountains, had long used the Westron as their native language, though in such a fashion as to make it hardly less unlovely than Orkish. In this jargon tark, ‘man of Gondor’, was a debased form of tarkil, a Quenya word used in Westron for one of Númenorean descent.

It is said that the Black Speech was devised by Sauron in the Dark Years, and that he had desired to make it the language of all those that served him, but he failed in that purpose. From the Black Speech, however, were derived many of the words that were in the Third Age wide-spread among the Orcs, such as ghâsh ‘fire’, but after the first overthrow of Sauron this language in its ancient form was forgotten by all but the Nazgûl. When Sauron arose again, it became once more the language of Barad-dûr and of the captains of Mordor. The inscription on the Ring was in the ancient Black Speech, while the curse of the Mordor-orc on was in the more debased form used by the soldiers of the Dark Tower, of whom Grishnákh was the captain. Sharkû in that tongue means old man.

"Orkish language" is a regional dialect of whatever is the main local language, with "Orkish Westron" being the main orkish language that they use for communication. Being satanic and evil orcs can not create their own original language - only take and warp someone else's.

That said, I wouldn't agree with "blame Tolkien". Tolkien had his shit together. Imitators didn't.

[Thaluikhain]

That said, I wouldn't agree with "blame Tolkien". Tolkien had his shit together. Imitators didn't.

Oh sure, when I said "blame Tolkien" I was being a bit tongue in cheek. It's not personally his fault that people forget he was a professor of languages (twice) or that that might be an important factor in creating languages. If there were to content themselves with aiming lower (much lower), they could hit their mark well enough. Burroughs, IMHO, is a good example of this. Didn't try anything too fancy, didn't muck it up too much.

[deaddmwalking]

It absolutely makes sense that there would be multiple versions of 'Dwarven'. The Dwarves of the sand-hills speak a different language than the high-dwarves of the Dolomite Hills. Coming up with a list of languages and naming them is a lot of work, and most people don't want to deal with it.

Once you say these different populations of dwarves speak different languages, you usually end up wanting to say that they're similar enough that people can communicate from different regions without learning a new version of the language. Spanish and Portuguese are different, but they're similar (especially for simple words), so you're likely to be able to order a beer or tell customs you're illegally transporting cocaine.

Generally, D&D is really accommodating about languages - it's easy to start with 5 or 6 languages just because. If you have different languages and most people speak one, you will run into language problems frequently. In a movie like Stargate, they dealt with that. But when they made a TV show, they decided that dealing with that every single episode was a pain in the ass, so everyone speaks English even though it makes no sense. If you go the route of having lots of languages and most people speaking one language, you are almost certainly going to want to make learning a language pretty quick and easy - but if you go too far that route, you'd expect that common languages accrete and we don't have something like our world where there are hundreds of languages spoken by groups of mostly monolinguists.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Oh sure, when I said "blame Tolkien" I was being a bit tongue in cheek. It's not personally his fault that people forget he was a professor of languages (twice) or that that might be an important factor in creating languages. If there were to content themselves with aiming lower (much lower), they could hit their mark well enough. Burroughs, IMHO, is a good example of this. Didn't try anything too fancy, didn't muck it up too much.

Even Supreme Language Nerd Tolkein sacrificed realizarms in the name of letting his characters talk to each other. The Shire and Gondor hadn't had regular contact for, what, hundreds of years? And they still spoke the same language. If Middle Earth was NotEurope you'd expect dozens of different languages and a lot of communicating by hand gestures.

[Longes2]

Oh sure, when I said "blame Tolkien" I was being a bit tongue in cheek. It's not personally his fault that people forget he was a professor of languages (twice) or that that might be an important factor in creating languages. If there were to content themselves with aiming lower (much lower), they could hit their mark well enough. Burroughs, IMHO, is a good example of this. Didn't try anything too fancy, didn't muck it up too much.

Even Supreme Language Nerd Tolkein sacrificed realizarms in the name of letting his characters talk to each other. The Shire and Gondor hadn't had regular contact for, what, hundreds of years? And they still spoke the same language. If Middle Earth was NotEurope you'd expect dozens of different languages and a lot of communicating by hand gestures.

Tolkien's languages are unusually resilient, that is true. Presumably on account of wizards and unusually high scholarship standards. Shire had contact with the larger world through Bree and elves (it's on the main road to Grey Harbor), which is admittedly not much.

However, the Hobbit dialect of Westron is a distinct dialect and the Hobbits are the rednecks of Arnor. So instead of cool posh British you should be imagining Frodo speaking like the translator cop in Hot Fuzz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw

[Emerald]

And now I'm just thinking "something something crystal spheres like ancient metaphysical philosophy posited, then Earth's shattered, and that's where the magic went (because, unlike atmosphere, gravity alone can't hold in magic, so when the sphere went away, the magic wasn't being held in anymore)" as an in-setting explanation for a "disappeared, reappearing magic" thing. Like, if there was magic, and it was held in, then that magic came from somewhere and either it's like oxygen, in that it is produced by something, and that production has always been a thing, it just didn't stick around, and that's how we get random unexplained shit, and maybe people figure out where it comes from, or the magic was some kind of finite resource, given by, iunno, simple answer is a god, and they've come back around and said "what the fuck happened!? *sigh* here, here's a new sphere, and new magic, don't fuck this one up!"

Well, Spelljammer did canonically have a mysterious and completely unprecedented broken crystal (named, unimaginatively, the Broken Sphere) where spelljamming seems to have originated and spread throughout the rest of the Material Plane, so....

It absolutely makes sense that there would be multiple versions of 'Dwarven'. The Dwarves of the sand-hills speak a different language than the high-dwarves of the Dolomite Hills. Coming up with a list of languages and naming them is a lot of work, and most people don't want to deal with it.

Once you say these different populations of dwarves speak different languages, you usually end up wanting to say that they're similar enough that people can communicate from different regions without learning a new version of the language. Spanish and Portuguese are different, but they're similar (especially for simple words), so you're likely to be able to order a beer or tell customs you're illegally transporting cocaine.

Keep in mind that even far-flung civilizations of the same race can remain connected via messengers on hippogriff-back and teleporting wizards and so on, and that the longer-lived races can have generations 8 to 10 times as long as human generations, so the separation is going to be a lot less absolute and the linguistic drift a lot slower than you'd see in equivalent human populations.

The great dwarven kingdom of Delzoun in Faerûn fell around 1500 years before the present, for instance, but to any of the breakaway clans that split up after the fall that's only 6 venerable dwarves ago; that's comparable to a human kingdom falling around 350 years ago, and the English (and Spanish and other languages) from the 1670s is still largely to entirely comprehensible to modern speakers, if noticeably archaic. Groups of dwarves (and elves and gnomes and so on) developing slightly different dialects and creoles over time I could definitely see, but I doubt they'd develop any actual new languages unless we're talking about a deliberately separatist and isolationist civilization (much more so than most remote dwarven tunnel complexes and elven forest cities, I mean).