Pidgins and Creoles

Last week, The Alexandrian had a post on Pidgins. The upshot is very similar to the language rules in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is that the more similar two languages are, the more likely characters can find enough common vocabulary to crudely communicate. For instance, when I visited Norway, I had the sense that if I had retained any of the German I took in college, that I’d have been able to understand a bit more Norsk than I got from speaking English, which in turn gave me more advantage than if I had spoken Korean or Quechua or Hebrew.

“Let’s see how much our language overlaps” is one way you can get a contact language and probably describes the origins of Sabir (“lingua franca”). However, a “pidgin” properly is when diverse groups all encounter each other (typically as slaves or contract plantation workers) and borrow vocabulary from the socially dominant group’s language to form a new proto-language. Notably, contact languages and pidgins lack much in the way of grammar so it’s hard to distinguish orc slays elf from elf slays orc. In the second generation, a pidgin will spontaneously develop a grammar and linguists call this a creole, though the speakers themselves may continue to call it “pidgin.”

For instance Hawaiian Pidgin originated in the early 19th century as a pidgin drawing vocabulary mostly from English (much more than Polynesian, Malay, or East Asian languages that were the native tongues of most of its speakers). At present though Hawaiian Pidgin has had many generations of native speakers and so is a creole with grammar that sometimes overlaps with English grammar, but other times not, and speakers can code switch between “heavy” Pidgin, mixed speech, and standard English. If you want to see an example of an English creole, see BBC Pidgin, which has BBC articles translated into West African pidgin (which is actually a creole, as it has several centuries of native speakers since it originated in the transatlantic slave trade).

So whereas Alexander’s post provided a mechanic, I’m suggesting more of a world-building conceit. If the orc kingdom took slaves from diverse nations to a mining colony, they will develop a pidgin, possibly based on Orcish vocabulary, for communicating with each other. Suppose an adventuring party slays the orcs and for whatever reason their slaves don’t repatriate but stay put, then in the next generation you’ll have a freedman colony speaking an Orcish creole, with mostly Orcish vocabulary but a novel grammar. This creole would be only partially mutually intelligible with regular Orcish.

Another world-building conceit, and one a bit closer to Alexander’s original meaning, would be that “Common” is actually a pidgin. This was more or less how Sabir or “lingua franca” worked. Lingua franca was not French. Rather it was a contact language of various Mediterranean languages, especially some Italian dialects, that dates from the Crusades through the 19th century. Apparently we don’t know that much about it and linguists argue, but I like to imagine it was a pidgin with less rich vocabulary and grammar. This could help explain why people continue to speak their respective languages despite all knowing Common. It may be that Common is good enough for visiting the market and asking how many flasks of oil for that longsword but nobody would compose poetry or tell jokes in Common.

Alternately, you could have Common as koineization. “Koine” literally means “common” in Greek and refers to the type of Greek spoken throughout the Hellenistic world after Alexander and eventually the eastern half of the Roman empire. In an earlier era, there were several distinct dialects of Greek, with the big divisions being Doric (Spartan) vs Ionian/Attic (Athens plus Mediterranean Asia Minor) vs Aeolian (Lesbos). And then there was ancient Macedonian, which the Macedonians thought was a dialect of Greek but the Greeks weren’t so sure. After the Macedonians settled the issue via the last argument of kings, it became necessary to have a pan-Hellenic dialect across the Hellenistic empires and kingdoms that succeeded to Alexander. This is why, a few hundred years later, a Jew from southern Asia Minor used Koine Greek to write letters to communities all over the eastern Mediterranean, as well as Rome (which had a substantial Greek-speaking minority), and this is why Koine Greek is also known today as New Testament Greek. Koineization is the implicit model of Common in Greyhawk, a setting in which most humans no longer speak their ethnically specific ancestral languages, and that’s certainly one way to handle it — that you don’t have to worry about language. It’s possible though to have a Koine and still have mechanics for language. For instance, characters might get some kind of reaction bonus if they communicate in the local vernacular. Likewise there might be a prestige dialect (as the Attic Greek of Plato and Xenophon remained in the Hellenistic and Roman eras).

One last really silly and meta possibility is you could have a pidgin of an alignment language, which throws the player characters as they wonder why the denizens of the utterly chaotic squat seem to be speaking Lawful Neutral.