The fantasy trope that everyone of a given species shares the same language always seemed a bit funny to me.

Co-author credit on this comic to my daughter, who came up with the concept. (She makes a lot of comics about dragons, but she’s too young to share them publicly.)

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
    4·
    8 hours ago

    I think pathfinder handled common well. It’s the default language of the sociocultural zone in which the campaign takes place. In the north Atlantic of earth common is English, in China it’s Mandarin, in South America it’s Spanish. It’s not necessarily everyone’s first language, but it’s the lingua franca. In universe this means that fantasy Mediterranean is speaking fantasy Latin as common while fantasy China’s common is fantasy Chinese

    I think it would also be cool for a setting to do something inspired by Plains Sign Language which evolved out of a trade sign language for people who didn’t speak each others’ languages or something inspired by Esperanto which was intended to be the global workers’ second language so we could communicate with each other on similar footing.