How to destroy Common in a smooth way?

[Dr TPK]

I'm playing in an established world, in the World of Greyhawk, and I like things very much canon, but I would like to start a process that would see the decline of Common tongue and see the rise of other languages. Do you have suggestions what would be a natural, realistic but relatively fast way to do this?

[Yora]

Retcon: Whenever the books say "common", they really mean "whatever language is most commonly spoken in the country we are currently talking about".

[Avaris]

Xenophobia. A rich and powerful nation decides that they want to protect their trade interests, so begins refusing to trade except in their own language, which helps their local traders and hinders those who use common. This may be part of a popular movement, or legally enforced. Maybe teaching children common is outlawed.

Once this one nation rejects common, others follow. The citizens start to think that their language is just as good as others, and so favour it over common. They have to learn another language to trade with that other country anyway, why bother with common? In time, it becomes increasingly irrelevant.

[johnbragg]

Do you have suggestions what would be a natural, realistic but relatively fast way to do this?

We're going to have to have some flexibility on the terms "natural" "realistic" and "relatively fast." If those terms are used based on real-world usage, you're talking about a centuries-long process. However, what is natural and realistic in a fantasy setting is a very different (and very-high CR) beast.

You could have a cult of chaos and discord unleash a force that rots away the common language, artificially increasing local dialect differences. People with more long-distance contact preserve more fluency with the rapidly-evolving "intercommon", which is close but not the same as Old Common.

As a quick kludge you could choose different thick stereotypical accents for regions other than the PC's home region.

If everyone at the table is already screwing around with smartphones and tablets during the game, maybe make them communicate in butchered Latin for Intercommon.

[ReturnOfTheKing]

Common is the language of international trade, am I correct? Well then, here's my solution - stop international trade. Without traders running around, there'll be no reason to speak Common, and each nation will resort to it's own tongue.

[jqavins]

Xenophobia. A rich and powerful nation decides that they want to protect their trade interests, so begins refusing to trade except in their own language, which helps their local traders and hinders those who use common. This may be part of a popular movement, or legally enforced. Maybe teaching children common is outlawed.

That would basically cut off all international trade until enough foriegners learn the language. It's good for domestic trade interests that face competition from imports, but bad for those who profit by imports and exports alike. To any reasonably diverse economy it would be suicidal. A nationalist movement might lead to this, but it would come at the expense of trade, not for the benefit of it.

Once this one nation rejects common, others follow. The citizens start to think that their language is just as good as others, and so favour it over common. They have to learn another language to trade with that other country anyway, why bother with common? In time, it becomes increasingly irrelevant.

I don't see it happening that way. Once this one nation shoots itself in the foot by withdrawing from the international economy, the others learn by their example and never even consider doing such a thing.

We're going to have to have some flexibility on the terms "natural" "realistic" and "relatively fast." If those terms are used based on real-world usage, you're talking about a centuries-long process...

Agreed, except I'd say "lots of flexibility." In the real world, and in a fantasy world that makes any kind of sense to me, unless there's an unnatural force brought to bear similar to what John Bragg described, people are not going to give up the ability to talk to each other if they've got it.

I'm with Yora: retcon it, or you'll have to pick something kludgey and/or cheesey.

[ArcturusV]

Yeah, generally the only way I could see to make it work is a Cataclysmic event going on.

Something like... the world gets Apocalypsed, maybe some god got pissy and said "Screw this" and just nuked the world a la Dragonlance, evil wizards with a supe'd up version of the Apocalypse from the Sky spell (Which if they could cover the entire world of Greyhawk would end up killing a majority of the population and almost guaranteed to wipe out some races like Gobbos and Kobolds, maybe fluff and say the deep dwelling ones are safe just to keep them in the setting). Then in the centuries following with communities small and not at all connected the corruption of Common into Regional Dialects and so forth can happen.

The other thing I can think of is a rapid influx into the language. I'm thinking something like the difference between Spanish (from Latin America) and Castilian spoken in Spain. Same sort of roots but one is more pure and one is the result of mingling populations, cultures, and languages. Would again, require a major shifting of the setting involving something... planar incursion where entire nations just get merged with and take in nigh alien like beasts? I dunno.

It was a basis of an idea somewhere in there, just not sure how to make it work without fundamentally altering Greyhawk. Mordekainen meddling and you end up porting in vast populations of Real Earth cultures into Greyhawk where their strange languages like English, Mandarin, Slavic, Swahili, etc, end up creating those pockets of mixed Common and Insert Particular Real Earth Dialect here? Still would be the results of generations of life of course. And that at least would have minimal impact to the setting compared to "Umm... Djinns just run around this region as a major population now and Common(Ignan) is now a thing and totally different than Common(Common) or Common(Aquan) or Common(Auran).

[Acacia OnnaStik]

I'm playing in an established world, in the World of Greyhawk, and I like things very much canon, but I would like to start a process that would see the decline of Common tongue and see the rise of other languages. Do you have suggestions what would be a natural, realistic but relatively fast way to do this?

Natural, realistic, and fast: Pick any two.

Some kind of catastrophe that makes inter-cultural contact much rarer would be both natural and realistic- not necessarily as big a one as ArcturusV suggests, the perfectly mundane fall of an empire is what gave us the Romance languages- but it would take a time-skip of quite a few generations before really noticeable differences came about. It would also, pretty much by definition, no longer be "very much canon".

The Babel curse is an interesting thought, it would be both fast and about as "realistic" as fantasy ever is, but it also sounds like you should be trying to break the curse, not allowing it to become the new reality of the setting.

Or you could not bother with verisimilitude and just go with the retcon- there has never been a common tongue, international traders have always needed to be polyglot or hire translators. It happens quickly, for our purposes, and the natural progress of linguistics is preserved, but... springing it on an ongoing campaign might not go over real well.

[jqavins]

Natural, realistic, and fast: Pick any two.

I'm not convinced you can pick realistic and fast.

Some kind of catastrophe that makes inter-cultural contact much rarer would be both natural and realistic- not necessarily as big a one as ArcturusV suggests, the perfectly mundane fall of an empire is what gave us the Romance languages- but it would take a time-skip of quite a few generations before really noticeable differences came about.

And even then you get languages that are noticably similar. When one of my father's best friends returned the the US from Italy with his new Italian bride, he and she were able to converse, with considerable difficulty but managing, by using his smattering of Spanish picked up just by growing up in New York. When I was taking Spanish in high scool, I challanged myself by reading a t-shirt's Spanish washing instructions; I was half way through before I noticed I was actually reading French (though I still couldn't comprehend French when it was spoken.) Spanish, French, and Italian (and the other romance languages) are certainly differnt languages, but their common roots still show through very clearly.

The Babel curse is an interesting thought, it would be both fast and about as "realistic" as fantasy ever is...

I guess it's a matter of what you call "realistic." To me, it doesn't count as realistic unless it makes some kind of sense without gods or magic being behind it.

[GungHo]

You can drop any given lingua franca, but you may want to consider how they come into being and why they're used. The use of "Common" is just a shorthand to reflect the phenomenon as it existed through history. But, if you want to make it "fast" and "realistic", the best way I can think of is to relocate. The lingua franca concept is historically regional. If you're worried about everyone speaking French in England circa 1200, move everyone to India. Sure, you'll have everyone else speaking Hindi, but the characters will still have issues and have to figure out how to communicate. Given the kitchen sink aspect of Greyhawk (and Forgotten Realms, Pathfinder, and the like), I am pretty sure there's an India somewhere. You don't need to necessarily destroy the world to have a portal go awry.

However, if "going to India" isn't acceptable because you want to use the map and the names on the map, yeah, a curse of Babel to remove the tongue, a metaphysical disaster, or some sort of invasion and "reeducation" would probably need to take place to make everything happen in short order, but an invasion/re-education/"fall of culture" would still put another Common in place eventually, as would going to India

[sktarq]

Well. In greyhawk IIRC common was the language of the great kingdom.

So have the daughter nations in an effort. To get away from the social connections of the malacite throne promote their own languages.

Common wouldn't die and the East Coast would stay dominant (possibly undergoing rapid evolution as nobility in some areas add bits o infernal or suel/viking loan words) but common as the everyday default language would pass by. Sure international traders and innkeepers would still know it but they would become the uncommon ones in their village.

Common would still still exist but just wouldn't be as common. And as that became normal the words that don't relate to trade, travel etc would be less used and many forgotten. Common ends up as bastardized trade creole while several languages that are semi understandable to each other (Spanish, French, Cantalan, Occelian, Various Italian languages/dialects) crop up. You can get the gist of most statements but have penalties to bluff, persuade, etc. And outside the old kingdom better find a priest, scholar, trader, innkeeper, or guide to help.

This would still take a century or more at its non magically assisted fastest but you said relatively.

So-have North Kingdom have a couple prominent marriages to the suel vikings or whoever doesn't use a common based tounge and have a major wave of cultural fadism bring in lots of loan words. Have the southern Kingdom start writing law in infernal (useful in its precision of legal terms for one) or celestial. Have one of the western nation Nyrond perhaps play up its independence and national identity by delving into a twin catacysm culture and promoting the descended language that had been until recently spoken only by the hicks of some tiny region still. Have other nations start using Balkunish in trade negotiation for feel of upsetting someone by using an term now popular in a rival region. Have a treaty written in three forms of "common" Northern, Southern, and Old for example and soon bards and nobles will think of them separate languages.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

Common is the most prominent language because it is the language of the most prominent race (humans), correct? So have humans become less prominent in the setting - something cataclysmic cataclysms the human lands, and the elves, dwarves, orcs and wereowlbears rise in their place, and the linguistics follows suit.

[lsfreak]

If common was a trade language or the language of a prominent empire, simply have it collapse into a bunch of different, related dialects. I'd say very, very roughly, it takes about 400-800 years for easily-understood dialects to split into only somewhat intelligible languages. West Germanic splitting into Old Dutch/English/German took about that long, and that's very roughly the difference of the Greek dialects today, and the dialects inside the Germanic languages. On the other hand, in 800ish years Middle Chinese has split multiple times so that the first wave of dialects have dialects within them that are not easily understood by each other, and the Vulgar Latin of the late empire rapidly changed into the old Romance languages in 400-500 years. Compare modern American/RP English to Doric, for example, which is ~800 years out. A much less conversational, more carefully pronounced example is here. (Keeping in mind that due to an abnormally high, consistent amount of contact between different dialects of English, these are more understandable than what you would expect. Imagine having never heard anything but the most neutral "British" or "American" accent, and then hearing Doric for the first time).

[Gritmonger]

As mentioned, the "Lingua Franca" of a time and place depends on who has the most influence, really. If a group is the main imperial power, then because of its outposts and the people associated with them, that language may become the "trade" language because of how widespread its speakers are, and how associated with settled wealth they are.

If many of the holy texts of a region are in a particular language, and that particular religion holds a lot of power either through trade or a common service or providing education, that can become the common language instead.

You can have several "common" languages depending on the circumstances - one for the educated and the nobility, for instance, and one for the common tradesmen and people of the market.

A "fast" way to establish a new common would be one of several routes: a new religion with its holy word in a particular language spreading rapidly, the recent "pacification" of several regions by an imperial power that wants more in taxes than in more territory to protect and "legitimate citizens" to adjudicate, the rise of a new center of learning in a region that means anybody who is educated has to learn or has learned that language, and it is percolating down to the common folks in turns of phrase and common sayings, a new set of traders has moved in with exotic goods who pay good prices, especially to those who can deal in their own tongue. You can have several at once - an educated, a common, and a trading tongue.

[Xuc Xac]

You could just say that Common isn't actually a complete language. It's just a pidgin used for commerce between people that don't share a language. You can list various commodities in it and give prices and times in it, but you can't have a conversation in it or sing a song. You can ask "one hour: how many silvers?" but you can't write a love letter in it.

You use Common to buy or sell things in the market or at the docks when foreigners are involved. Nobody speaks Common at home as their first language.