Languages of Garnia

Languages of the World

It's no secret that I have disliked the way languages work in D&D, we've talked about it before, but I never had any sort of definitive statement about them until now.

Humans speak a variety of languages, Avalonish being the “common” tongue of the campaign. It is related to Old Garnian, which is a language spoken by the highly educated and scholars. Old Garnian is descended from a more ancient tongue, called by some High Garnian*, which is again, a scholar's language, but also serves as a liturgical language. A minority of people in the High Kingdom of Avalon speak some other human tongues, among these are Wodanish, Frodian and Mistlander (Roddy probably speaks Mistlander), these are generally related to ethnic groups of refugees that settled on Avalon with the Garnian speaking people that founded the kingdom. Frodian is spoken also by many practitioners of the magical arts, the people of Frodia were known in the ancient world to produce

There are a couple of other Human languages that are spoken by trading partners of Avalon, Norsk, Nihongo and Hanyu. There is also a constructed language called “Trader”, which is a pidgin mish-mash of Avalonish, Norsk and Hanyu.

The Human natives of Tirnakaur (the place where the campaign is set) speak in a variety of dialects of a debased version of Old Garnian.

Written Human languages that are not spoken by anyone in the campaign area, but are learned by scholars and theologians are Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Demotic, Arabic, Sanskrit, French and English.

Dwarves and Elves have their own languages. The Elven language is called “Sidhe” (pronounced Shee) and is of much interest to those who study magic or history. The language of the Dwarves we'll call “Dwarven”.

Halflings speak the language of the communities in which they live, and, if they live in a Halfling community, speak the language of the nearest Humans.

Gnomes speak an Elven influenced dialect of Dwarven, we'll call in “Gnomish”.

All Goblinoids, and many Humanoids and outright Monsters speak a language called “The Dark Tongue”, which is derived from the infernal language of the lower planes.

Orcs have their own language, Orcish.

All Dragons (and intelligent dragon-like creatures) speak Draconic.

Infernal is spoken by the creatures of the lower planes.

Celestial is spoken by the creatures of the higher planes.

Presumably this means that Humans are far less conservative than non-Humans with regard to language. Honestly there should be thousands of languages, many will be fairly mutually comprehensible with each other, like the way German kind of fades into Dutch as you move west. There is also no real reason that you should be able to speak to the Goblins of the Snowy Mountains just because you learned the language of the Goblins of the Dark Forest. Realistically they should have diverged in their speech from one another at a faster rate than Humans, because they have a much shorter lifespan. I have also made the Humans in this world evolve their languages at an exceptionally slow rate, making them very conservative linguistically. Avalon has been separated from other Garnian speakers for like a millennium, and it doesn't matter what your mother tongue is here on earth, it's different than that same tongue from a thousand years earlier. I deal with these issues for gamist reasons, the same reason why I have a chosen language spoken with proficiency when it is taken. Realistically my one year of high school Spanish isn't going to be any real help if I am suddenly stranded in Guatemala, but in D&D you either know a language or you don't.

*High Garnian itself is a pidgin tongue based on Gaulish, with Heavy Brittonic and Gaelic influences, which is itself a simplification as Gaulish Arverni isn't the same tongue as Gaulish Aedui, which neighbors it, much less Gaulish Boii. They all share a common root, and have some degree of mutual comprehensibility, but accents, loan-words and other influences are going to make life difficult. Experts divide Celtic languages into two groups Goidelic, from which Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx are derived, and Brythonic, which includes the modern languages Welsh and Breton, Gaulish was a Brythonic language, as was the much more recently extinct Cornish language. So technically Garnian is a Brythonic language, the only surviving Goidelic language in this game world is Mistlander, which is, more or less, Scots Gaelic. Pictish should have been included in the mix, but Scholars do not know enough about it to decide what language group it belongs to, it may be a Goidelic or a Brythonic tongue, or it might be an extinct third branch of the Celtic tree, or it may have been a pre-Indo-European language, or it may have been a Germanic language. Place names and personal names that managed to be recorded have not been exceptionally helpful.