The Common Tongue

Ever notice how every single piece of fantasy that describes a world inhabited by lots and lots of races of "intelligent" creatures features a common tongue? For instance, in the Lord of the Rings, there is a Hobbit language, and there's Elvish (two varieties, at least), and there's Orkish and Entish and Dwarvish and various other languages. But every hobbit, elf, orc, ent and dwarf also speaks this at-large hegemonic language, which I think is that of humans, and so they can all communicate with one another. Many other fictional worlds that are set in something very much resembling our world but with all and sundry demons or spirits or what have you inhabiting it in addition to we normal humans do something similar: all of the random demons and spirits happen to speak English. I suppose that in French television they speak French. The end result is the same: everyone can communicate with everyone else.

This thought occurs to me just because I'm reading a bunch of constitutional cases about language rights and it's making me think about how much we don't have a common tongue in this human world. A whole lot of countries can't even really manage to have a common tongue within their own borders. And it tends to tie them in knots; see: Quebec. This is the weird thing about language: from a "rational," by which I mean to connote the kind of hard-nosed pragmatism associated with economics, perspective, there should only be one language. Having so bloody many different languages is quite distinctly problematic for the actual process of interaction and cooperation; there's a reason that the whole Tower of Babel story is cast as a punishment. But of course if you suggested that we abolish all languages but one (and note that I am not suggesting that!) you'd be met with howling from all corners, and not just because it's close to inevitable that you'd be suggesting English and no one who doesn't speak English natively themselves really loves our linguistic hegemony anyway. We have this weird thing where we have lots of different languages purely by accident, because for thousands of years after we developed the capacity of language humankind lived scattered across the globe with only the most viscous cultural diffusion. That's a recipe for divergence. But given that we do have all of those accidentally different languages, they are each bound up in a specific culture that really, really likes its own language and really, really doesn't want to give it up.

Fiction writers tend to gloss over these issues. It's understandable, I guess: if the Orks actually couldn't speak Dwarvish and the Elvs didn't understand the Hobbits it would be very difficult to write the Lord of the Rings. You'd be spending all of your time working through the language problems. And that detracts from the story. But I think it's just interesting to note how much we really don't have that kind of universal communicability in the real world.

Also, I think Harry Potter deserves props for this, as for so many things, because there are lots of non-human creatures in that world who don't speak English. The merfolk in the lake at Hogwarts actually can't speak English, at least above ground. And at events like the World Cup they actually mention that the Hungarian Minister for Magic doesn't speak English, either. But there you have these people like Albus Dumbledore or Barty Crouch who speak hundreds of languages and can function as interpreters at need. And, of course, the story takes place almost entirely within Britain, where most of the endemic magical creatures who speak at all will be speaking English.

I also think it would probably be fairly easy, if one lived in a world with fairly abundant "magic," to craft a spell that would make the things you said intelligible to anyone who was listening, regardless of the language they spoke. In fact my guess is that the merfolk at Hogwarts have something like that working when they're under water, though of course it's never made explicit.