Common Tongue: Difference between revisions

* ''[[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--Hancommon—Han, for example, speaks Huttese, Wookie (though he sounds really stupid when he tries), and Rodian.

** Tolkien's work may be the trope namer, but Tolkien's handling of languages was subtle enough that later fantasy works seem like [[Flanderization|Flanderizations]]s in comparison. The [[Common Tongue]] in the time of the novels is Westron, which evolved from Adûnaic, the language of one of the tribes of men who joined the Eldar in Beleriand in their fight against Morgoth during the First Age; Adûnaic later became the language of Númenor, who later became the major imperial power in Middle-Earth, and then the language of the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor, where it changed quickly and evolved into Westron under influence from Elvish languages. Most races and human nations in the story have their own languages (e.g., the Rohirrim, who speak a more archaic version of Westron, represented by Old English in the actual book), but a substantial number of these people can speak Westron as a ''lingua franca'', in the case of dwarves, they actually refuse to speak their language to nearly anybody who's not a dwarf (in all of history, they only taught it to some of Celebrimbor's people...and Eöl, although they don't like talking about that). Hobbits are recorded to have spoken three different languages through their history: the northern hobbit races originally spoke a language closely related to that of Rohan, while the southern ones spoke a language related to that of Dunland. When they settled in Arnor, they all came to speak Westron.

** Also, during the First Age as recounted by [[The Silmarillion]], Sindarin ("Gray Elven") was the [[Common Tongue]].

* ''[[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 -- apoint—a simplified artificial interspecies language, essentially Space Esperanto.

** Chinese linguistic unity is further increased by its logographic (each symbol represents a word) system of writing; the same glyph would be pronounced differently in each language, but usually remains the same. Therefore, a written language independent of speech, known as Classical Chinese, developed, serving as a [[Common Tongue]] (or Common Pen?) for the educated not only in China, but also countries under Chinese influence (Japan, Korea, and Vietnam). However, Classical Chinese was based on Late Old Chinese and thus did not reflect several features of more modern Chinese languages, including pronunciation<ref>Contrary to popular belief, most Chinese characters ''do'' reflect pronunciation; they are usually composed of two parts, one giving the sound of the syllable it represents, and the other indicating the meaning)</ref> and grammar. Classical Chinese fell out of use shortly after the [[No More Emperors|Xinhai Revolution]] of 1911, but the Republic of China (Taiwan) used it well into the 1970s for certain government documents.

* 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--factorspress—factors that tend to stabilize languages--arrivedlanguages—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--manyliterati—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).