Languages

Once again, the dearth of updates makes it appear that I’m neglecting the game, and in this case that would be correct. Unfortunately, my brain only allows me to be obsessed or uninterested, and at the moment it’s not D&Ds turn. I can only handle a couple of obsessions at a time, and right now it’s remodelling my house and relearning all the Spanish I forgot twenty years ago. Since this is a D&D blog, though, I owe it to my three subscribers to at least try to relate these things somehow to the game. All I can say about the former is that, as a first-level mage, I’ve become proficient in the angle disk grinder, so I can deal 1d4 damage to ceramic and porcelain with no saving throw permitted; it’s the latter I’ll focus on.

(Side note: Whenever I sign up for an online language course, there always seems to be a questionnaire at the beginning asking why I want to learn the language in question. The options always include things like ‘for work’, ‘for travel’, and so on. Why is ‘for fun’ never one of the options?)

Our party consists of individuals from Canada, France, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, UK, and US. Almost all are able to at least converse in more than one language, and some are fluent in multiple languages. Mostly, in the real world, there is a spectrum; but in D&D we’re somehow content to say our characters ‘know’ three or more languages and leave it at that.

Today I’ll explore what sort of communication the PCs might actually be able to have in the broader campaign setting, given what they ‘know’.

'Language' versus 'Dialect'

 

Wikipedia map showing classical Greek language groups

Our initial domain being Crete, the common language is Doric. There are few differences in word use around the Kingdom of Minoa, and our party has thus far been able to communicate perfectly with everyone they’ve encountered using this language only. When the characters were rolled, though, I allowed players to choose as many languages (‘dialects’) on the map as their INT scores allowed; with justification, some were allowed to choose from outside the Greek language family.
 

The use of ‘dialect’ here is obviously misleading. When a common language, Koine, was finally developed in the Greek territories, its vocabulary did not distinguish language from dialect the way we do in modern English. In our society, we usually use the terms politically: differences within countries are more likely to be described as ‘dialects’ than languages regardless of the degree of difference. Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, are called dialects of Chinese even though they are less mutually intelligible than Spanish and Portuguese. Here in modern Japan, ‘dialect’ refers to anything with a couple of odd vocabulary choices and a few different verb endings here and there; a few centuries ago, the languages of Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka were so different as to be mutually unintelligible.
 

It’s difficult to know now the depth of linguistic disparity between the coloured areas on the map, but research indicates that there were more significant differences in vocabulary and pronunciation than in grammar, although grammatical differences were also present.

 

Some years ago, I bought a copy of Propaganda by Edward Bernays online, and then left it unread on my shelf until last week. I had placed the order through a Japanese-language firm, and in doing so didn’t look carefully enough to realise that the book I was ordering was a Spanish translation. Now, having continued studying Italian for several years, I had enough background in Romance Language structure that, after refreshing my memory of basic Spanish vocabulary, I was able to pick up this book and puzzle out the meaning of more than half of what I read.

Clearly, a similar process should apply when D&D characters are exposed to an unknown but related language to one in which they are proficient.

 

Allowances for Proficiency

 

The map indicates three language ‘groups’ within the Greek family: Western, Central, and Eastern. Within the Western group are Doric, Northwestern, and Acheaen; Central includes Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot; and Eastern, Attic and Ionic. As I said previously, all our Doric speakers understand each other completely; they will have some trouble understanding either of the other Western group languages, but some basic communication will still be possible. Tentatively, we might say that with effort they can understand about half of either of the other language. Outside this group, there will still be similarities and a person of average intelligence might be able to pick out a fraction of the words, but communication will be difficult. We might halve this again for possibility (or degree) of communication between monolingual speakers of a different group.

 

Beyond the Greek language family, commonalities will represent only a small sliver of total language, but a history of trade and migration should have introduced certain influences that still allow for the possibility, however small, of figuring out the meaning of some portion of text or spoken language.

 

Thus when characters overhear a random shout in a different language, or stumble upon a fragment of parchment, they should instinctually apply their knowledge of whatever languages are written on their character ability sheet to their interpretation of the spoken or written portion of language they encounter. For game convenience, percentages of total comprehensible similarities may be converted to percentage chance of comprehending a given specific utterance.

As a d20 table, potential for comprehension might be expressed thus:

Mutual Intelligibility (roll number indicated or above)

	Western			Central		Eastern
	Doric	NW	Achaean	Aeolic	Arc-Cyp	Attic	Ionic
Doric	0	10	10	15	15	15	15
NW	10	0	10	15	15	15	15
Achaean	10	10	0	15	15	15	15
Aeolic	15	15	15	0	10	15	15
Arcado- Cypriot	15	15	15	10	0	15	15
Attic	15	15	15	15	15	0	10
Ionic	15	15	15	15	15	10	0
Carian	19	19	19	19	19	19	19
Lydian	19	19	19	19	19	19	19
Thracian	19	19	19	19	19	19	19
Macedonian	19	19	19	19	19	19	19
Illyrian	19	19	19	19	19	19	19
Cartaginian, Farosti, etc.	No comprehension possible without proficiency in related language

 

Rolls should be made based on the closet language to any of those listed on the character record sheet, not necessarily the character’s native tongue.

Players might roll the d20 themselves if they know for sure what language they’ve encountered—perhaps someone told them, or they would be able to guess based on their geographical location—but for a really exciting scenario, the DM might conceal this information and roll the die in secret to tell the player which words he could make out. In this way there is also the possibility that he isn’t sure, or may have misinterpreted.

 

Just for fun, we might like to further complicate the process by applying bonuses and penalties for intelligence. The numbers in the chart above are, as I said, for characters of average intelligence. As our discussion of INT scores always came around to foreign language ability, we’re almost obliged to provide adjustments for communication potential based on this number. We might give a bonus to the rolls above, perhaps of +1 for every two points of INT above 10, and -1 for every two points below, giving us this table:

Communication Probability Adjustments

INT Score	Adjustment
Below 3	-4
3-4	-3
5-6	-2
7-8	-1
9-11	0
12-13	+1
14-15	+2
16-17	+3
18 +	+4

 

In this way, when the party travel outside the initial domain and have a chance to be exposed to other languages, we have a slightly more concrete idea of how their skills apply in this department.

 

I have no intention of ever using these tables, but if any player at any point in the future wants to remind me that I created these, and insists on using them on the grounds that they will give him some advantage, fair or unfair, over DM fiat, he will most certainly have my blessing.