Common Tongue: Difference between revisions

 

== 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.

* 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.

 

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