Language in a Vacuum

[Phietadix]

As I work on my Fantasy World (The World of Vagor) one of the things I found is that it can’t really support more than one language. Vagor is, like many fantasy worlds, a created ((as opposed to evolved)) world. And as a created world it began with humans who already spoke one language, now in the Christian Creationist model the languages spilt supernaturally at the tower of Babel, something like that doesn’t make much sense in Vagor. This leaves me with one language.

Now the question I have is this, how would the language of a single language world change? I am aware of the fact that languages change over time, and there are numerous factors involved, but if you had only one language in the world how much would it be expected to change? There would be no outside language influences, only internal and naming new things. So would it change much at all, especially since there is a lot more foreign interaction in this world than ours and literacy being wide-spread earlier? Would you expect someone from an isolated area to understand the rest of the world easily?

Any information or thoughts on this would be appreciated, especially of the overloaded Ravana kind of information.

 

[skip.knox]

Take a look at dialects. These are all from one language, but they can vary so greatly that people from different regions literally cannot understand each other, though in other cases, the differences are minor. Differences include grammar, individual words, colloquialisms and accent. There's the famous statement that America and England are two nations divided by a common language.

In other words, even with one world language, you're pretty much free to have people understand or misunderstand each other as it suits the needs of your story.

(of course, if they're in a vacuum, nobody could hear each other anyway) gdr

 

[ascanius]

Now the question I have is this, how would the language of a single language world change? I am aware of the fact that languages change over time, and there are numerous factors involved, but if you had only one language in the world how much would it be expected to change?

The big determining factor is going to be time. Using the real worlds time as reference if your language began 4k BC and the story is set in modern times 2k AD that language is going to have gone through major changes and branching. This becomes more so if groups of people become isolated, the mountain village, settlers, or exodus. Another contributing factor is going to be minority groups. look at the way black people speak compared to whites in the US and how they have influenced the US language in a short time span. Ask any white 40 years ago what sup means and they probably wouldn't know. Then you also get into differences in pronunciation such as deep southern states in the US and northern, western, Midwestern. I pronounce it watchya doin, I've heard whatya doin too. who here says pop instead of soda? I say pop, or y'all? Even though we all speak US English and we all have been educated small differences exist and grow in a short amount of time, roughly 200 years. Don't forget that even though people are educated doesn't mean that when they are with friends and family they speak the same way. Most immigrant communities speak their native language in the house and English out of the house. Or another example, a friends aunt was a high school English teacher who spoke proper English and all that. However among friends and family and other blacks she spoke ghetto.

So in my opinion the greater the amount of time, more possibility of isolation (physicall and societal) the more likely it is going to be to have noticeable differences in language and full out divergent languages(if enough time passes) that don't even seem related.

Language is very dynamic not static.

 

[Hainted]

It wouldn't have to be that big of a time shift. Look at English. Start with Chaucer, then Shakespeare, then Milton, Shelley, Poe, Doyle, Howard, Hemingway, Ginsberg, Zappa, Seuss, Lil Wayne, and any online forum, and realize that's all the same language. Watch BBC America, then ABC, and then stream something Australian. Go even smaller and compare Jeff Foxworthy, to Tennessee Williams to Larry the Cable Guy who all supposedly speak the same dialect of English. Class, economic level, education, occupation, and the need for teens to keep adults in the dark, all play a part in it. Just because everyone speaks Vagorian(?) doesn't mean they're all speaking the same language.

 

[Saigonnus]

I would think language in a vacuum would be drowned out by the roar of the engine... Vooooooooooooommmmmm... XD

All kidding aside, I agree with those above. even if you start with one language, over time (especially if millennium or eons have past since the world was "built") then you could hypothetically have several if not dozen of languages with the same root. Nations are conquered, annexed, changed, become introverted. Many societal changes and interactions can bring about new languages.

Think also about constructed language (i.e. Klingon or Esperanto). If a certain social group want to make it so even the "common" people around them can't understand what they are saying, they will make up code words or whatnot, given enough speakers and enough need to advance the language, it could hypothetically become it's own language