 Here's a fun fact. Did you know that before the French Revolution in 1789, only around 12% of the people in France could speak French fluently, and that most of them could not speak it at all? The population spoke a variety of different languages from place to place, including French, Occitan, Breton, Basque, Catalan, Alsatian, and German. There was even a language based around whistling that was used by shepherds in the Pyrenees Mountains. And even in the regions that spoke French, there were dozens of dialects, some of which were so different they may as well have been separate languages. What we think of as French today was the Parisian dialect. Most of the population lived in isolated villages and farmsteads, though 20 miles down the road and there was a different language, or at the very least a weird dialect and accent that made the people there hard to understand. The first attempts to get more people to speak a single language came in the 16th century, and they were very half-hearted. It was only with the end of the monarchy that the French government truly attempted to establish a national identity among the populace, and part of that was by getting them all to speak the same language. This took generations and it was brutal at times, but eventually the whole population spoke French, with only a few still learning their old languages to keep them from dying out. Speaking French continues to be a part of many people's identity to this day, just ask Quebec. And you know the weird thing? France is not the only country with this evolution. Other parts of Europe in the Middle Ages went through a similar, albeit less pronounced, change. China's been doing it for centuries. Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia have extinguished many of their minority languages, both during and after colonization. There are thousands of languages and dialects in the world today, and the number used to be much higher since they're constantly being subsumed by bigger ones. Verbal language is the primary way that humans communicate, meaning that it's a massive part of our society, yet it rarely gets brought up in world-building. In most fantasy and sci-fi settings I've seen, language tends to either be a last-minute addition or ignored entirely. Empires on different continents or planets will talk exactly alike and have no trouble understanding one another beyond a few odd slang words. It's annoying and unrealistic and it breaks immersion, so it's high time I spent some time talking about it. This will NOT be a video going into the nitty-gritty of how to make an entirely new language. Some writers like Tolkien did that, but I find the thought of it both intimidating and boring. Life is pretty circifian already, we don't need to craft our own boulders. Plus, I don't possess the knowledge of linguistics necessary. Rather, this will be a video about how to place languages in a spot that makes sense, culturally, geographically, and socially. All languages fall into language families, sometimes also called language trees. When languages are all in the same family, it's because they're related. Language families are lumped together because they're all descended from the same parent language hundreds or thousands of years ago. That said, just like a real family, some are more closely related than others. Your third cousin twice removed is still part of your family, but not as close as your brother or your dad. English is part of the Indo-European language family, meaning that it's related to Hindi and Urdu and Kurdish. Those are pretty far from English, though. The family has different branches, though, such as Germanic, Slavic, and Romance, and those are much closer to English. English and Dutch are similar enough that if you focus, speakers of one can sometimes understand what speakers of the other are saying, which you can't do with Hindi. They're all still closer to each other than to languages from other families, though, like Turkish, Japanese, or Arabic. So, how does this tie into world-building? It's not uncommon to see constructed languages in fantasy and sci-fi, whether they're fully realized or just a few words and phrases. However, they never seem to follow any real patterns. The writers will just keyboard smash to make some new words for country A, then keyboard smash to make some new words for country B. Sometimes there's an attempt to make them sound different, but rarely does anyone consider how they might influence one another. I'm going to do a test. Listen to these words and try to guess if they're Japanese or French. That should have been simple. They're very distinct from one another. They belong to separate families, and the speakers have had no contact until recently. If all these words were part of the same fictional language, it would probably seem odd. If there were two languages that developed from the same ancestor, like how Bravosi and Valentiz in A Song of Ice and Fire both came from Hybelerion, then they shouldn't sound as different as Japanese and French. In short, if languages are related to one another, they should sound at least a little similar, and the more similar they are, the easier they are to learn, and vice versa. The Expanse does a great job of this. Belts or Creole, or Belta Lang, is a mash-up of various other languages, from Mandarin to English to Spanish to Hindi, reflecting how the Belts was colonized by people from all over the world. If they had simply spoken English, like in many sci-fi futures, the entire setting would have felt smaller, less alien, and less fascinating. Listening to or reading Belta Lang, it's pretty obvious where it came from. There are words that are very similar to real languages in there, so you can sometimes get the gist of what they say. To prevent languages from mixing at least a little, you have to keep the speakers from interacting too much. In the Starfire series by David Webber, there are entire planets that were colonized to act as ethnic enclaves, usually by minority groups who wanted to hold on to their own culture without being absorbed into the larger, humanity-wide identity. While this sort of thing can get messy, these colonies aren't forming independent nations or trying to cleanse their territory of those who don't fit their definition of what a proper citizen is, so it's overall fine. If the colonists started doing that, though, it would serve as a source of conflict. These planets have people that speak Russian, or Swahili, or Arabic. However, to participate in the larger Galactic community, they need to learn standard English, kind of like those small towns in Ireland that still speak Gaelic. So in your own world building, consider how different languages may operate. Does the Republic of Smilandia speak a language in the same family as the Rekaldorf Empire? If so, how closely related are they? Is there a reason they mixed or didn't mix? Ask yourself some of these questions and you'll make your languages, whether fully constructed or with a small vocabulary, sound better. They can sound different or similar as long as it makes sense to do so. And remember that the farther from your native language a new one is, the harder it is to learn, which means fewer people will be willing or able to do it. Translators, or translation technology, become even more important in that situation. This is something that I sometimes see brought up with difficulties between humans and other races, but not very often. In the Gundam double O movie, they meet aliens called extraterrestrial liquid metal shapeshifters, which literally have no concept of communication outside their hive mind. They assimilate everything they come across not out of malice, but since they don't know any other way to interact with the universe. Humans only figure out how to talk to them through a shitload of anime logic involving psychic powers and future technology. Aliens or fantasy races might communicate by changing the color of their skin, or releasing scents, or changing the temperature around their bodies, or electrocuting each other. Feel free to get creative here. Fantasy and sci-fi races still have a lot of room to get weird, but they so often still communicate the same way humans do. Languages change over time. This is well known, though hard to measure since it doesn't happen in any consistent or scientific way. English is an odd language with inconsistent grammar mostly because so much else has been mashed into it. It's primarily a Germanic language due to the Saxon invasion of Great Britain, but there's also a lot of Latin from when the Normans took over. Then there are a bunch of Greek words that have been added over the years, plus some Celtic words, and a few from various Native American languages. This has all come together to make something that is, frankly, a mess. And this sort of thing happens all the time in history. When two different languages interact, they both change. Lone words are very common, and it's not unusual for entirely new dialects to form based on how much foreign influence some regions have. Spanish has around 4,000 words that come directly from Arabic since most of Spain was ruled by Arabs for several hundred years. However, there's still very, very different languages from one another, not at all mutually intelligible. Sometimes the ruling classes dialect subsumes the one spoken by the majority of the population, sometimes the opposite happens, and a lot of the time they merge. In Spain, most of the people remain Spanish speakers despite the Arab Muslim ruling minority. In the Qing dynasty, the Manchu took over China, but eventually began speaking Mandarin themselves. And in England, the Normans flooded the peasant dialects with French. Sometimes words from two languages will turn into a new hybrid. For example, automobile is a combination of the Greek word autos, meaning self, and the Latin word mobilis, meaning movable. In short, when there's contact, languages influence each other. This isn't always an even trade, but it's a trade nonetheless. If there's a situation like, say, an imperialist empire conquering a smaller nation, then this should reflect in the ways they talk. The generations who grow up under foreign rules should speak differently than their parents and grandparents, even if it's just a few lone words here and there. Over time, assuming their old language still stays alive, it'll change from what it used to be, and ignoring that is a gigantic oversight that just about every world builder makes. Even if there isn't a new language pouring in, the way people talk changes over time. You shouldn't be able to read text from an ancient empire just because you live in a spot where it used to be. The opposite of language merging is also true, though. When two or more groups who previously spoke the same tongue are isolated from one another for generations, they start to talk differently. There used to be a single, proto-Indo-European language, but when the people who spoke it spread out across a continent, they became completely unrecognizable. A very good way to isolate these groups and keep their languages apart is geography. Things like oceans, deserts, mountains, and swamps are difficult to traverse and limit the amount of communication groups of people have, especially without modern technology. North of the Alps, people speak German. South of the mountains, they speak Italian. The thick jungles of Southeast Asia resulted in a dozen different languages belonging to several different families. Even the Chinese and the Mongols were unable to exert complete control over the region. Basically, things that prevent empires from military conquest are also good at forcing languages to develop in different ways. There are ways other than geography to divide people, though. If national borders pop up, then the governments on either side can enforce policies that make them speak differently, even if they used to talk the same. Or if different economic classes speak different languages or dialects, which happens frequently when one ethnic group rules over the others, then they may not interact on a regular basis. There are a lot of ways to divide people, some of which are done on accident, and some are done on purpose. Spend a little time thinking about what sort of divisions exist in the world you want to make and how that might affect the ways people talk to each other. The Shan Shan had had zero contact with the Westlands for a thousand years. They shouldn't be able to understand each other. Just do a better job than Robert Jordan, everyone. That should be simple. There is no scientific way to determine an ethnic identity. The definition will change depending on time period and location, and it'll always be arbitrary. Biologists and anthropologists are completely disinterested in trying to come up with a hard definition because no matter what, they'll anger some people and there really isn't a good way to do it, not even DNA. Language is often tied into the identity of the people that speak it. In the ethnic cleansing that took place all over Europe after both World Wars, language was one of the primary ways in which people decided if you were German, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and so on. If someone spoke the wrong way, they were often forced from their home. Arabic is not one language. Depending on what area you go to, the people from there might be speaking dialects that are so far apart as to be separate languages. People from Morocco, Egypt, Qatar, and Lebanon are not able to understand each other, at least not very well. Yet it's still referred to as a single language, particularly by outsiders, because these people are often all considered Arab, and speaking the same language is part of that identity. Serbian and Croatian are in the exact opposite boat. Their languages are 95% mutually intelligible, which means most linguists consider them different dialects of the same language. However, Serbs and Croats kind of hate each other. A lot. Just so much hate. So they refer to their languages as separate. There are tons more examples. Does this make sense? Not really, no. It's arbitrary. People tend to identify more with people they can talk to. In the world you craft, think about how it can bring people together or push them apart. If the people on the other side of that mountain range talk the same as you and have a similar culture, then you'll probably feel some sense of camaraderie with them, even if it's not that strong. If you wanted to discriminate against them, you'd need another excuse, like religion or skin tone. However, if they talk differently, that makes them seem more alien. This can be used for a lot of things. It's easier to convince people to go to war against those that are different, you can make your setting seem bigger and deeper, and it can serve as a way for things to evolve over time. Medieval and ancient societies did not have national identities as we think of them today. They saw themselves as citizens of their town or region, sometimes as members of a larger ethnic group, but nationalism did not exist. Much like France before the revolution, they didn't have unifying languages. Communication and travel were much more difficult, so they happened less often. And as time went on, they started to identify with larger and larger groups, partially because they could all talk to each other. If you have a fantasy setting, rather than making it a generic medieval one, fast forward the clock a few centuries, throw in a few places that are turning from feudal patchworks into genuine nation states with all the conflict that implies, or if it is a medieval one, then take advantage of the many barriers to communication to cause issues for the heroes and villains alike. Or if you have a post-apocalyptic setting, have different nations arise in the ashes of what was formerly a single civilization and have them speak different languages to show how much things have changed and split since the collapse. A sci-fi setting? Well, it'll be more difficult to convince the colonies to rebel if they don't feel different from the people on Earth. And so on. And finally, we reach a very important part of human communication. Writing down information helps to preserve it. Many cultures who relayed their history orally have had their knowledge wiped out when they were invaded or met with some other disaster. Some people tend to dismiss oral history, claiming that it's unreliable. The thing is, you can lie and exaggerate in writing, too. Just read through your uncle's Facebook feed if you don't believe me. They're not that different, if you think about it. There are, broadly speaking, three types of writing systems. Logographic scripts, syllabaries, and alphabets. Alphabets are simple. Each symbol represents a sound. In syllabaries, each symbol represents a syllable of several sounds. And logographs are unique symbols that represent one word each. Chinese has several thousand characters because each one is a different word. Many ancient writing systems were similar. Writing has been independently developed three separate times, possibly four. By the Sumerians, the Chinese, the Mayans, and maybe the ancient Egyptians. Every other writing system has directly or indirectly been derived from one of those. There are a few artificially constructed alphabets which are sort of an exception to this. One is Hangul, the Korean alphabet, which was constructed artificially in the 15th century. They used to use Chinese characters, but due to the complexity of that alphabet and differences between their languages, King Sejong ordered some scholars to create a new phonetic alphabet that's easier to learn. Sorry, he totally did it himself with no outside help. Wink, wink. Even then, the developers had to know what written language was to create their own system, and despite being derived from these same few places, there are over a dozen different alphabets in use today. So that was a bit more information than I wanted to get into. Writing is, or at least should be, an afterthought to building languages. That holds true whether you're going to the trouble of crafting one or just making vague gestures at how different groups talk different. The reason for that being that writing is just an evolution of speaking, which is more critical to regular communication. The main utility of writing is being able to speak to a larger audience than you otherwise could. If you give a speech, you might get a few people to listen to you. If you write a book, your message can spread all over the world. It may need to be translated, but it can spread. The main way writing can play a part in worldbuilding is by allowing messages and knowledge to stay around even in places where it would otherwise decay. Memories are fallible. Words on paper or stone stay the same from the moment they're put down, unless one of the shards of adenalsium is nearby, but that's another discussion. Ancient civilizations will have their knowledge lost if they didn't preserve it somehow. There are ancient languages we still can't read, and because of that we know nothing about the history of the people writing them. Even if we could, much of what they wrote has been lost or destroyed. Most Mayan literature was destroyed by the Spanish, meaning we know far less about them than we otherwise would. Maybe the mystery of the classical Mayan collapse would be known if that hadn't happened. It's doubtful that they would have had any technological advances or knowledge that our modern world would find all that useful. In a world with magic, though, who knows what they might have others could use. Messages are harder to send if the people giving slash receiving them can't read, and that could also be important because mass literacy is recent. Being able to read and write could easily be a sign of wealth in the setting we create. Or maybe it's after the apocalypse and very few people remember how to read. We'd be their ancient long lost civilization when you think about it. They might view us like how we view the Atlanteans, the only difference being that we are real. Like I said, written language should be an afterthought here. I would just feel odd if I said nothing about it. Much like every aspect of world building, languages are complicated and tie into everything around them. They affect the governments, cultures, religions, and people living in a region, but they're also affected by all those things. How much does it matter? It depends on how much you want it to matter. Like I said, creating a whole language from scratch is a big commitment, and frankly I'd advise against that if you're world building as part of any sort of project, whether it's a book, an RPG campaign, or something else. You should only do it if you're doing it for fun. But language is, at its heart, the way humans communicate. It's an integral part of any setting larger than a single country. Even then, they could easily have multiple languages and dialects that might hinder communication. There are a few things lazier than crafting a fantasy world where everyone talks the same. Even just a few lines now and then about how people can't understand each other makes a setting that much deeper than it otherwise would be. Or you could just give each country an accent from a different part of the British Isles. That could work, and you'd never run out. I'll see you later. Bye.