Common Tongue: Difference between revisions

 

{{examples}}

* ''The Basalt City Chronicles'' averts this; in the Empire of Smilodons, it's said that there's a language for every island and a dialect for every village. Some cultures even have more than one language, for example the Deltharians (most of whom are deaf) have a spoken language used by the few who can hear.

 

== Film ==

* ''[[Star Wars]]'' uses Basic, the language of the Galactic Republic. Nearly everyone understands it, even aliens that lack the ability to speak it. Likewise, most aliens have one language that they speak constantly. Interestingly, multilinguism is quite common—Han, for example, speaks Huttese, Wookie (though he sounds really stupid when he tries), and Rodian.

 

== Literature ==

* In the [[Liaden Universe]], the common language is called Trade, and that's what it's mostly used for.

* In ''Hellspark'' by [[Janet Kagan]], the common language is called GalLing' (presumably from "galactic lingua franca"); it's an artificially-constructed language, and one of its design features is that it only uses phonemes common to all human languages, so that anybody can speak it without difficulty.

{{quote|"And Morporkian is something of a lingua franca even in the Klatchian empire. When someone from Hersheba needs to trade with someone from Istanzia, they will undoubtedly haggle in Morporkian."}}

* In the ''[[Foundation]]'' series everyone speaks Galactic Standard, albeit with some dialects.

* The ''[[Humanx Commonwealth]]'' universe has "symbospeech", an [[In-Universe]] [[Con Lang]] that became a common tongue through serendipity. Shortly after humans and [[Bee People|thranx]] met one another, they spent some time working out a language that was easily pronounceable by both species, as they had wildly different vocal apparatus, and the thranx language incorporated significant body language aspects in addition to vocalizations. When additional species were encountered, symbospeech was found to be functionally pronounceable by them, too, and thus became the ''de facto'' galactic language.

* Anne Mason's Kira Warden novels have "the interplanetary language". Theoretically, most people know how to speak it; in practice, a lot of them are pretty bad at it, and it's not very good at nuance, providing lots of work for interpreters like the protagonist.

* In ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'', the main language of Westeros ("translated" as English) is actually referred to as the Common Tongue. It is contrasted with the Old Tongue (i.e. Old English), spoken by the original people who lived on the continent,as well as High Valyrian (i.e. Latin/Romance languages), spoken by foreign conquerors.

* In the ''[[Uplift]]'' series the ridiculously organized and stagnant culture of galactic civilization has resulted in at least twelve different Galactic languages (numbered 1-12) designed to accommodate the wide variety in vocal structures, humans seem to have the easiest time with Gal 7. One of the assorted ways that [[Humans Are Special|Earthclan]] is different from the other oxy-breathing races is that they have languages other than Galactic, mostly Anglic and Trinary, a poetic language designed for dolphins.

 

* Commonly [[Zig-Zagging Trope|Zig-Zagged]] in ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' and ''[[Angel]]''. Almost every demon speaks English, even ones in alternate dimensions, until it's more dramatic for one not to.

* ''[[Babylon 5]]'' had Interlac, which I think was math-based. (As it went, most races seemed to learn English easily enough, though admittedly most examples were diplomats and traders.)

* ''[[Star Trek]]: The Federation'' had Federation Standard and the Klingon and Romulan empires had the racial languages of the Klingons and Romulans.

** Although, the line between this trope and [[Translator Microbes]] was frequently blurred.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'', being heavily based on ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'', uses this extensively. But tries to not give in ''completely'' as it has language-related magic. Specific settings are likely to have a "Lingua Franca" and a handful of specific languages.

*** Simplified in 4th edition, (no surprise there) for the most part there are only ten languages, with common being the trade language. There are however 7 other languages for different regions.

* ''[[Traveller]]''. Galanglic was the official language of the Third Imperium.

* ''Dark Dungeon'' RPG, supplement ''Samaris, island of Adventure''. In the world of Yaddrin, the Common Tongue is spoken by most merchants and travelers.

 

== Video Games ==

* ''[[Mass Effect]]'' makes heavy use of [[Translator Microbes]] in the form of computers that need to be regularly updated for new languages, as practically every species in the setting is as linguistically diverse as humans. There is, however, a "trade tongue", which Shepard refers to as "Galactic" at one point—a simplified artificial interspecies language, essentially Space Esperanto.

* ''[[The Longest Journey]]'' gave us Na'ven or Alltongue, a magical language spoken in all of Arcadia (a parallel universe). Its omnipresence is justified with the fact that you can become a fluid speaker after listening to it for just a few minutes, as April does upon her first visit to Arcadia. It's magic.

* In ''[[Dark Star One]]'', all alien races use a language called Terra (read: [[Aliens Speaking English|English]]) in order to make communication between them easy.

 

* Most units in ''[[Erfworld]]'' speak Language, but Natural Allies have their own (unnamed) languages, and only a few members of each tribe speak Language.

 

== Web Original ==

* [[Aliens Speaking English|English]] is the common language of the ''entire universe'' in ''[[Chaos Fighters]]'', as explained [http://journal-of-murazrai.xanga.com/755247488/page-104-random-chaos-fighters-tidbit-1/ here].

* The First Federation of ''[[Orion's Arm]]'' attempted to standardize "Anglic", but once the Feds lost power Anglic evolved into a family of languages several times more diverse than the current Indo-European family.

 

== Western Animation ==

* All the various cultures in ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'' appear to share the same language. From pole to pole and around the world.

* ''[[He-Man and the Masters of the Universe|He Man and The Masters of The Universe]]'' and ''[[She-Ra: Princess of Power|She Ra Princess of Power]]'': Pretty much all of the countless species and races on Eternia speak or at least understand English. Furthermore the same applies to Etheria, Trolla, Primus... pretty much any planet or dimension the characters encounter, including Earth making this also a case of [[Aliens Speaking English]].

 

== Real Life ==

* English is the most universal example of this trope In [[Real Life]], due mostly to the very expansive English speaking British Empire and later the global dominance of the United States in the latter half of the 20th century. Although it is not the most natively spoken language, it is the most often taught as a second language, and thus the most widely spoken. This is confirmed by international treaty, which stipulates English as the official language of aerial and maritime communications, and is considered a working requirement for various scientific fields. They don't call it "The world language" for nothing.

* [[Esperanto]] is an attempt at this.

* Further constructed languages attempting this: Interlingua and Ido.

* As part of the legacy of the conquests of [[Alexander the Great]], Greek used to be pervasive throughout the old Eastern Roman Empire, to the point where even [[The Bible]] was translated into it so that it could be understood by Hellenized Israel. Hellenistic Greek is actually the Trope Co-Namer, as its most basic and used variety was known as ''Koine Dialektos'' (literally, the Common Tongue).

* Russian, conversely, enjoyed this status in the Communist bloc; learning Russian there was like learning English in Europe. It still works that way in the countries of the former Soviet Union.

* In general, when a large empire spreads its language around and then dies (either by being conquered or by [[Balkanize Me|splitting up into squabbling fiefdoms]]...or as often happens, [[The Roman Empire|both]]), the language usually starts to diverge into dialects, which dialects eventually become mutually unintelligible. However, that language may persist as a Common Tongue for the educated. One of the weirdest cases of this has to be the situation of Arabic. Nationalism and the printing press—factors that tend to stabilize languages—arrived at a time when the dialects of Arabic formed a continuum<ref>e.g. an Egyptian speaking entirely in dialect can relatively easily understand a Palestinian doing the same, and a Palestinian a Syrian and a Syrian an Iraqi and an Iraqi a Kuwaiti and a Kuwaiti a Bahraini, but the Egyptian and Bahraini can barely understand each other if at all</ref> with only one significant break (between Western "Maghribi" and Eastern "Mashriqi" dialects,<ref>Or alternately between ''Darija'' and ''`Ammiyya'', after the native word for the colloquial speech: ''Darija'' ("low, base") is used in Western, ''`Ammiyya'' ("popular, common") in Eastern</ref> right about where the border between Egypt and Libya is today), and even that wasn't a complete one. Additionally, everyone in the region used various forms of Classical Arabic (the language of [[The Quran]]) for educated writing. As a result, Arab scholars developed Modern Standard Arabic, a streamlined form of Classical Arabic that also tends to get flavored with the dialect of the user,<ref>For example, Egyptians will pronounce as a hard "g" what everyone else pronounces as a soft one, a Tunisian and a Syrian will call months by different names, and ''everybody'' prefers to use subject-verb-object sentences ("Sam eats oranges") rather than the verb-subject object ("Eats Sam oranges") preferred by Classical Arabic, to say nothing of how lists are now almost universally "X, Y, and Z" rather than "X and Y and Z")</ref> but which is universally understood by anyone who has been to school in an Arab country. However, people still speak their native dialects in all but the most formal circumstances; even in semi-formal situations, people will speak in their native dialect but use a lot of Modern Standard vocabulary. This last bit is the cause of a major fight among the Arab literati—many feel that this "educated colloquial" should form the basis of a new standard, abandoning the Classical entirely. Those who accept this view themselves bicker about whether one "educated colloquial" should be adopted as a single standard for all Arab countries (creating a new Common Tongue) or whether each country or group of countries should adopt their own standards (abandoning the idea of a single Arabic language altogether).

* The Japanese dialects aren't so different that people would have too much trouble communicating with each other (aside from a few cases of [[Separated by a Common Language]] and when Okinawan get involved), but they still have ''hyojungo'', or "standard language", that is roughly based on the Kantou dialect.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Language Tropes]]