CURIOUS TALE SATURDAYS: ARCHIVE

Say What?

The Not-So-Universal Translator

Saturday, September 8, 2018

In most fiction, there is only one visible language: the reader's.

For all the languages that a fictional setting may be declared to have, with a token foreign phrase or vocabulary term here and there, and perhaps a bit of lip service paid to the idea of language barriers in that fictional world, there is really only one language that matters, and that's the reader's own.

And for good reason! If you were to literally depict your fictional languages (or fictional accounts of real-world languages) in the book, the reader would face the enormous obstacle of having to learn those languages, at least minimally, before being able to decipher that text.

Honestly, I would never advise violating this prohibition unless you're out to do something very specific. But what you can do is give more story prominence to the effects of language barriers.

Of course, even if this is done in the reader's own language (let's say English for the sake of example), language barriers introduce an obstacle of their own: Language barriers impede dialogue, literally. They also impede idiomatic shorthand, sociocultural points of reference, all kinds of plot devices, and a great many other things that typically want to happen in the kinds of stories we're accustomed to reading.

In fiction, there is only one good reason to introduce to your audience to the aggravations of a world where most people don't speak the same language. Only one good reason to put those language barriers front and center in a meaningful way—and that's when you're going to delve into the stories that language barriers facilitate, more so than the stories they hinder.

This week, I'll be discussing the topic of having a setting that meaningfully has more than one language.

Relance has over 10 thousand.

Ten Thousand Languages

Ten thousand languages might seem high. It's more than 50 percent higher than all the languages alive on Earth today. But it's actually a number carefully determined. Relance as a whole has a population in the very low hundreds of millions—between 80 million and 300 million, likely around 120 million. (The figure remains in the form of a range so as to accommodate future world variables that I have not yet defined, which could affect what constitutes a reasonable world population. But I'm shooting for about 120 million.) If we round that to 100 million, and say that each language has 10 thousand speakers on average, that works out to roughly 10 thousand languages.

If 10 thousand speakers per language sounds low, remember that Relance is a world largely without modern urbanization trends and global transportation systems. In such an environment, neighboring populations often don't interact enough to develop a common language. Instead the opposite usually happens: Languages diverge in their various dialects, driven by geographic isolation, as well as economic stratification and cultural segregation, and ultimately break apart into new languages.

The biggest of these forces by far is geographic isolation. Longstanding but isolated little hamlets of a couple hundred people will most likely have a unique language all their own, or at least a powerfully distinctive dialect, because people will have different things to talk about, and will renew their vocabulary differently, and develop their own cadences and inflections. Larger towns will follow the same trend, except with more internal variation. Here on Earth, in times gone by (and in a few locations even still), and so too on Relance in the Galan era, an obstacle as simple as a hill or a river would very likely have marked a language boundary or at least a dialect boundary.

Now, of course, these boundaries will often be fairly soft. The languages on either side of that hill will often be similar, indicating some amount of interaction, and perhaps a larger shared cultural or political history. Thus, both on Earth and, more importantly, Relance, that figure of 10 thousand languages neatly fits into a much shorter list of language groups. It has never been necessary for me to estimate that number before now, but I would imagine that Relance has only a few dozen language groups.

I've done quite a bit of work on identifying the more significant of these groups over the years, which pops up in my writing here and there. For example, in the Curious Tale Saturdays miniseries on warks that I did a few years ago, I mentioned the "Yolandish languages," referring to a region in the Upperlands. I've described the Divine Locution in a past Wiki Wednesdays entry. I've mentioned the "languages of the Davoranjan plain" and the "languages of the eastern kings"—I often describe a language by its geography, and now you know why. We know the chief (though certainly not the only) language of the Empire is Ji. And Pali is the chief language of Ieik. Just to name a few!

My operating rule is "Every location has its own language unless there's a good reason for it not to."

This isn't trivial. Languages are a powerful component of ethnic and cultural boundaries. Language barriers are often enormous hurdles deemed not worth overcoming, both to individuals and whole societies. The distribution of languages across Relance implies a lot of history, and is a significant contributor to my worldbuilding efforts.

Bypassing Language Barriers

But this isn't an article about the languages of Relance. It's an article about bridging those languages, for the benefit of agents in the story, and, in an auxiliary sense, for the sake of not driving readers insane.

As I said at the beginning, it's quite an imposition upon readers to introduce realistic language barriers to a story. It gets in the way of all kinds of plotlines. That's why most fantasy and sci-fi has a "universal translator" of some kind—sometimes in-universe, like Star Trek's actual technology by that name, and sometimes out-of-universe, whenever an author decides to gloss over or outright ignore language barriers even when, realistically, they should exist.

Like I said, there's only reason to both a reader with something as troublesome as language barriers. Well, actually there are two reasons. One is for comedic or entertainment value. But the other one—the one I had in mind—is for when the story wants to explore that space.

And a rich space it is! There is a certain kind of storytelling that asks readers to go through the trouble of reading about a world where language barriers are a real phenomenon, just like they actually are in real life. This is a storytelling which means to delve into the cultural differences brought about by lingual distinctiveness.

In most of the published Curious Tale work to date, language barriers haven't been especially significant. In The Great Galavar, the Ieikili all speak Pali, and language barriers have not been an issue except inasmuch as the words of the Gods are confusing. (Though that is a valid example of what I'm talking about.) Circumstances are similar in the Prelude to After The Hero, where everyone speaks the language of Gala except for the conversation between Galavar and Rennem right at the beginning.

But in The Curious Tale more broadly, with all of its world travel and overlapping of peoples, language barriers become a fairly significant issue—enough to actually cause a problem that I've been actively mitigating for years.

And, so, the first thing I want to talk about when it comes to dealing with language barriers in Relance is bypassing them altogether using in-world mitigations, for situations when the story wants to go places where language barriers do get in the way.

Mitigation No. 1: Language Groups

One way to immediately reduce the problem to a simpler, more easily-solved form is to give key characters proficiency in key language groups. Much like how knowing one Romance language on Earth will carry you a long way in bullshitting your way through other Romance languages, or how knowing English and (Mandarin) Chinese will enable you to have at least a rudimentary conversation with almost half the people in the world, Relance has a few key language groups that collectively encompass most of the world's languages. If a Relancii individual learns one language in the most widely-spoken language groups, they have arguably accomplished most of the heavy lifting that has to be done whenever the story calls for that person to interact with someone else.

This is a good enough idea that it's actually a technique used among the Relancii themselves, and not just a lucky coincidence I paint onto my characters. Known (ironically) by various names in different societies, in Gala this strategy is a component of the "Cosmopolitan Languages Series" at the Academy, where exceptional students and students in certain areas of study are educated in the world's three to six greatest languages, affording one, at bare minimum, the rudiments of conversational capability in the most significant world capitals among the upper classes, and with large numbers of ordinary people.

Mitigation No. 2: Cosmopolitan Languages

The ability to converse with large numbers of people, and the ability to converse in high-society circles, are not the same thing. Learning Ji, the foremost language of the Panathar Empire, and by far the most widely-spoken and culturally significant language on Relance, actually does confer both powers, as it enables one to converse not only in scholarly or high-class circles but with most of the Panathan public as well. Yet in many other lands there are distinctions between the languages of the aristocrats and their people.

Insomuch as there is often greater utility in speaking with the rich and powerful as opposed to the hoi polloi, therefore on Relance—as it has been on Earth—there is a practice in higher education of teaching the most useful languages for interacting with "the right kind of people." These languages, known in Gala as the Cosmopolitan Languages (hence the name "Cosmopolitan Languages Series"), are collectively the lingua francas of Relance. Scholars, merchants, political leaders, and anyone else who needs to interact with their counterparts of other nationalities will almost always know at least one or two of these cosmopolitan languages (to varying degrees of proficiency) in addition to their native tongue.

There is of course Ji, yet, due to the hatred most of the world feels for the Empire, Ji is much less widely spoken outside the Empire than you should otherwise expect. Its main value is inside the Empire. However, by osmosis it has interbred heavily with the languages of the Southern Middemesne, and there is a (not uncontroversial) practice among some in Tanzibay of knowing it for the sake of "knowing one's enemy." It is also fairly well represented at the center of the world, in the Overshadowed City and inside Junction City itself. Some in Davoranj know it too, for Davoranj is farther away from the Empire than most, and therefore is less antagonized by it. And of course there are many Imperial-influenced outposts, like Soda Fountain and the Village of Ieik (and later the City of Sele), where Ji is either the parent tongue of a new language or a well-known lingual cousin.

But the true greatest Cosmopolitan Language is Speckish, the language of the Elite Echelons (the upper classes) in the Kingdom of Tanzibay. Virtually every well-educated person in the world knows at least a little Speckish. Speckish occupies the special status of a language that is important and respectable enough to be used by the upper classes, without being so important or respectable, or holy, that its use is restricted too narrowly. The Tanzibans are fond of boasting that Speckish is spoken in every palace and every great market in the world—and they're not far off from the truth.

The next most significant Cosmopolitan Language, and the one rounding out the Big Three, is Torvus, the language of the Aigas of Davoranj, which is also used throughout Davoranjan society. But the real value of Torvus is that it is also widely spoken among nobles down through the Keferst River Valley—who, at various points in history, were vassals or junior partners of Davoranj in exchange for protection against the Empire. Torvus has even spread into the Northern Middemesne, making it a vital language of exchange in a region heavily fragmented with cultures and languages.

In this same spirit, there are not one but two Middemesner languages that serve the same purpose: Yolandish, and Yehudish. In the sense I mean, these are technically language groups and not single languages, though there are also multiple languages that go by one of those names (due to different societies naming their language the same thing—the Middemesne is a pesky place). Broadly speaking, Yehudish is more prominent in the south and east of the Middemesne, while Yolandish is more prominent in the north and west, and spans up into the Upperlands. Moreover, these two languages are distantly related, so learning one is an aid in learning the other.

The aforementioned do not cover the whole world. There are regions that don't speak languages belonging to any of the language groups those languages are contained in.

Meanwhile, it is the sixth of the great Cosmopolitan Languages that is perhaps the most interesting of them all. Yli is the closest equivalent to our modern-day ancient Latin: a dead language, yet one that was spoken by golden societies in ancient times, and therefore a trove of knowledge and wisdom. Yli is not as widely taught anywhere, compared to the other five, since it is of use mainly to scholars, as well as aristocrats in the societies where aristocrats are raised to be scholars by default. Moreover, as a dead language, the quality of Yli education is often highly questionable. What many Yli speakers know as Yli isn't even Yli, but a bastardization of it or even of other tongues. In fact, in Gala, with all its emphasis on learning and refinement, there are only a handful of fluent speakers, most of them taught by Silence Terlais, who learned it herself in Junction City—where it is still alive, but which is not a place that most of the Relancii go.

It should be noted that, with the exception of Yolandish and Yehudish, all of these languages are very different from each other, belonging to entirely different language groups. You have to go up to the level of language super-groups to find further similarities, where you will find that Yolandish and Yehudish are a descendent of a language close to Speckish, that Speckish is a descendent of Ji, and that Ji is a descendent of Yli. As for Torvus...who knows where the fuck that got invented?

Mitigation No. 3: The Gallery of Not-So-Universal Translators

Getting back to Mitigation No. 1, where a person can fumble their way through a long list of languages by learning one language in each of several major language groups, Mitigation No. 3 takes a different approach to the same solution: In situations or long-term scenarios requiring knowledge of multiple languages, I can choose to have multiple characters involved, and distribute the linguistic specialization among them. In other words, instead of having a universal translator, I can employ several ordinary translators.

This is usually the most practical solution, as it requires any one person to know far fewer languages (and spend far less time on the years of study that go into that), yet still allows high degrees of proficiency. And, indeed, this is something I've implemented very widely throughout the story, and, again, it is something the Relancii naturally have thought of for themselves.

You'll find this strategy especially helpful among the fractious Resistance, which contributes to the political drama and intrigue that beleaguers them, since not everyone can talk to everyone else. You'll also find it in the much better-organized yet equally far-traveling Galan army, where DeLatia always makes it a point to have a variety of capable translators on hand at all headquarters.

Mitigation No. 4: The Polyglots

This is the nuclear option. When nothing else is feasible, and a character has to know many languages, I can declare them a polyglot.

I don't do this very often. "Do-Everything" characters, like Galavar, can reasonably be expected to speak many languages. Classically-educated nobles and scholars on Earth have historically been taught in multiple languages too. It's a reality facing anyone who is expected to be able to interface with other cultures or their writing. Galavar is very well-educated, and even studied abroad in the Empire for years. And he's a genius, so it's not such a stretch to say that he has a great capacity for learning languages. He therefore has a reasonable command of all the world's great languages, plus his native tongue, and varying proficiency in several lesser languages. However, he isn't necessarily a true polyglot, in the sense that some people can seemingly learn unlimited numbers of languages. He has taken his sweet time learning all of this.

The issue of a single character needing to know many languages in a hurry first arose with Silence—another "Do-Everything" character—in the context of her Handsel Band. Previously, I had never really given much thought to Silence's multilingual skills, but the dynamics, logistics, and operations of the Band meant that the other three strategies were not able to resolve the problem. There aren't enough people in the Band to viably have a gallery of translators. The use of Cosmopolitan Languages doesn't address the Band's worth with ordinary people in the lower classes. And learning a handful of languages from the key language groups still left all kinds of holes that would be relevant to the Band's work, to say nothing of the crucial importance of possessing a high degree of language proficiency in the course of trying to win hearts and minds.

Silence, at least, is one of those people where you wouldn't be surprised that she could pull something like this off. Even still, given her overpowered character stats, I've tried to be conservative about applying her talent, favoring, whenever possible, scenarios where she learns a language as she goes—and is necessarily imperfect at it—rather than being declared to have somehow known that language in advance. Thus, instead of automatically installing a ton of languages into her, I've installed the ability to learn languages rapidly, which I think fits better with her character: She's a fast learner, but she's also got so much going on in her life that she wouldn't have had enough time in the past to just randomly learn 40 languages.

There's another member of the band who is also a polyglot. I figured that would be the sort of role Silence would anticipate and seek to fill: "Yeah, I don't have room for 20 bilingualists, but I do have space for one polyglot!" This way I can spread out the load on Silence, and also not decapitate the Band whenever Silence is away from them doing other work.

Afiach Bard is another polyglot. Like Galavar, it would be more accurate to say that she is heavily multilingual, since she doesn't have a savant-like capacity for learning new languages rapidly like Silence does, but "polyglot" is fine too whenever we're not worried about being too precise. Learning new languages is literally a part of Afiach's job as a place-singer and traveling bard: She needs to know the local languages in order to interact with people at all, and to learn their songs. In return, songs help her branch out into new languages, where she may already recognize some important words and have a basic sense of constructions. So, with Afiach, I spin her massive knowledge of languages as something that she's been slowly but steadily accumulating for her whole professional life.

Exploring and Developing the Problem

Having both introduced the problem of language barriers and developed a credible bypass to that problem, for situations where the story requires that I gloss over or explicitly surmount these barriers, I can therefore tackle the interesting subject of language barriers entirely on my own terms, and with minimal unintended imposition upon the reader.

This is a really fascinating space to explore, and even in 2018 I am only just beginning. My interest isn't, and has never been, to weigh down the reader with a bunch of foreign language. You'll notice—and I've written about—how I routinely use English when I'm creating new vocabulary for Relance. I am not Tolkien and do not have the ability to develop functioning languages. That's not even a part of worldbuilding that especially appeals to me, certainly as a general item.

Rather, my goal is to look at the interactions and conflicts and stories that occur when people who speak different languages encounter one another. Different ways of doing things. Different philosophies. Different customs. This stuff is tied up much more extensively in language than we often realize. My favorite example is shouganai, but a great example in English is "an honest day's work," which has deep ties to our puritanical work ethic that drives Americans to toil endlessly and to feel moral revulsion toward those who don't live up to this standard. Many cultures are not like that. Our language reflects who we are, what we care about, and how we act. Thus, language barriers persist even after the rudiments of a language have been learned, because there is still so much to learn about the shared yet subjective experiences of a culture.

The true "universal translator" is not a polyglot, nor an author who conveniently ignores language barriers, nor any of that stuff. The true universal translator is a storyteller who explores the alienness—the sometimes brutal, desolate alienness—of encountering a different language...and then weaves that into some thread of commonness or togetherness that the reader can understand and appreciate.

There's also a lot of interest and fascination to be had in the slightly less high-brow exploration of simply getting over the language barrier at all. Working together with someone, moving from a limited, laborious collaboration to something that gradually opens up...building understanding, crossing divides, learning and unlocking...that's all pretty cool, just like it is when any two characters really get to know each other. You can flavor this with additional tones for even more explorative value, like adding a sense of urgency as a way to drive efforts forward, or undertaking a shared project to build the tension of moving toward some accomplishment or discovery.

Here are a few places in The Curious Tale where I deliberately engage with the problem of language barriers. I look forward to showing you some of these interesting subplots in the stories to come!

Darmok and Jalad on the Ocean

And there you have it: a look at language barriers in the context of Relance.

That's all for this week. Join me next week when we take a look at what happens when somebody wants to leave Gala. Until then, may your only barriers be words.

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