More Thoughts On Language

Quick, stick this fish in your ear!

I've had no luck in locating any board games with a language mechanic. RPG designers, on the other hand, often devote incredible amounts of detailed attention toward implementing languages or, at the other end of the spectrum, to denouncing anyone who does. This doesn't give me much to work with, so I'm basically starting from scratch.

Let's think about what kinds of people could be recruited into your little New World expedition:

• A citizen of your own country: This person can easily speak with you, assuming your country has a shared linguistic heritage.
• A citizen of same neighboring country: Either one or the other of you need to learn the other's language, or else you both need to learn a third common language (a lingua franca).
• A native of some new unexplored land: You can't speak to this person unless you find a translator.
• A member of a "lost tribe" of people from your civilization who have relocated to the new world in the distant past: You'd need an ancient language to have any chance of speaking to them.
• A current (or former) guest/captive of the natives: This person can potentially communicate with both you and the natives!

It's really the fifth category of person who's the most important to you, and who represents the essential Rosetta stone you need. You could slowly teach yourself a language, of course, but probably not at the same time as traveling hundreds of miles, and certainly not on the timescale of a few months. So if you can find a refugee or castaway who's gone native (like de Aguilar), that person is literally your ticket to success.

The second to the last person on the list is someone who didn't exist historically, but certainly played heavily in the minds of many European explorers who hoped to find something like Prester John's kingdom, and there are tantalizingly close cases where it almost happened (such as the Jesuit discovery of the Nestorian Stele a few centuries too late). It's definitely a plausible alternative mechanism to include in an alternate-history game or in a fantasy game (where the lost population might literally be the same emigrants if they came from a race with magical longevity, like elves).

So essentially we have three tiers of languages to represent (with some circa 1500 AD examples):

1. Native languages (old world and new world) - Spanish, French, German, Dutch
2. Trade languages (old world and new world) - Sabir, Yiddish, Aztec (Nahuatl), Inca (Quechua)
3. Scholarly languages (old world) - Hebrew, Latin, Greek

Knowing a native language is easy, but also of limited utility. A trade language is more widely distributed, but only more intelligent members of your team would be able to speak one. A scholarly language is potentially the most useful of all in terms of distribution (assuming a "lost tribe" scenario), but only the highly educated could access it.

Of course, some speakers might be lucky enough to have their native language be a trade language, or even a scholarly language. This is a blessing but also a curse of sorts, since it makes it rather less likely that such a person would ever bother to become multilingual. Still, if you speak the lingua franca, you probably don't have anything to complain about given its relative utility. The success of far-ranging explorers of Renaissance-era Spain and Enlightenment-era England effectively allowed those languages to be promoted into the "Trade" category, a significant cultural accomplishment -- which is why English monolingualism is the fruit of global hegemony today.

Now let's think about a character system where intelligence is effectively differentiated by modifiers ranging from -3 to +3, with seven total tiers that have a bell-curved distribution. The three general cases would be:

1. Character with negative modifier (-3 to -1): Only a native language (better hope it's also a trade language, or that you have a friend who can translate for you!)
2. Character with 0 modifier: You know a native language; if it's not a trade language, you also know one of those too.
3. Character with positive modifier (+1 to +3): You can add a scholarly language as well.

We can distinguish between limited fluency and full fluency by using the value of the modifier. That's less important at the low end. If you can't speak well, you're going to be a soldier, not a diplomat. But for the high end it matters quite a bit, since you might need to translate the flowery speeches of your impassioned leader to the impressionable locals.

One final situation that might arise for fantasy games: Some races (like those long-lost elves) can probably pick up lots of extra languages just due to longevity. The idea of "bonus languages by race" is an established RPG trope, and I'd probably include it for appropriate settings. That would make finding a good elven linguist even more important, since you'd pick up the ability to chat with goblins, gnomes, kobolds, etc, in the process. In this case having a negative modifier might actually matter, since you'd lose some of these racial languages (and all the other elves would laugh at you).