Tabletop Gaming and Languages

All right, so now I'm totally outing myself as a geek. You know, one of those crazy people who meet every week, sit around a table and roll weird-looking dice in order to determine who is the smartest, strongest and best (all right, and usually to achieve some greater goal as a team). You wonder what this has to do with languages? Well, even in a fantasy world, different people (and elves, and dwarfs, and orcs...okay, forget it) speak different languages.

Most races start with at least two languages, their own one and a more universal one. The universal language exists so that all party members can actually communicate with each other, even if they are from different races. You can probably compare it to Esperanto, the artificial language created as a universal language. However, unlike in the fantasy RPGs, the universal language in real life is actually spoken by only a small part of people. The crux: As long as most people don't speak Esperanto, people will rather choose to learn a real language like English or French instead of Esperanto, which doesn't help to increase the number of Esperanto speakers....

So what is the difference between the universal language in fantasy RPGs and Esperanto? Those RPGs assume that most people speak the universal language, a status quo which actually offers a great motivation to learn it. You only need to learn one additional language instead of several to be able to speak with others from several different races and regions.

In our real world, English has a similar status quo in many different areas of life. People in most countries speak and understand at least some basic English, and in many business-related areas, especially marketing and IT, English is the universal language for international teams and cooperations. If you speak English, you are, in fact, able to talk to people from many different countries and with many different native languages.

To come back to tabletop RPGs: The main question is whether or not languages are following a logic rule. I say: Yes, they do. Even if the used premise for an artificial universal language is far from reality, the situation that people actually grow up with their native language and a second language used for everyday business is found in many countries. In fact, many families with migration background live in the very same situation; they speak their native language at home and learn the country's official language for their everyday life outside their home.