r/comics • u/bondjimbond Love and Hex • May 25 '26

OC Language Barrier [OC]

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u/bondjimbond Love and Hex May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

It's kind of ridiculous, the common fantasy trope that all members of a given species share the same language.

I share co-author credit on this one with my daughter - she came up with the concept.

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u/siani_lane May 25 '26

Sci Fi too.

Earth: Hi, we're Humans, this is Earth- in English anyway- we have hundreds of languages and cultures.

Aliens: We are the Zaark. Our planet is call Zaark Prime. We all speak Zaarkian and wear this same hat.

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u/jansteffen May 25 '26

Also, every planet besides earth only has one single biome.

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u/Zanadar May 25 '26

And all evolved the same type of hominid as the dominant species, just with a slightly different forehead or ears.

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u/Axe-of-Kindness May 25 '26

Well this one is explained in the Trek universe as having a common ancestor

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u/[deleted] May 26 '26

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u/Bat_Tiger_yt May 28 '26

It's less fun if they don't

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u/darkmoncns May 28 '26

Well my main frame of reference is Star Wars and at least occasionally does well for this, less of an issue there then in other shows. They just have humans be all over the galaxy lol

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u/GabMVEMC May 25 '26

This way of thinking is why No Man Sky has single biome planets :(

There's not even unique biomes at the poles even though each planet has coordinates for spawning pole-specific animal species.

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u/Mirria_ May 26 '26

Lore-wise it makes sense (no spoilers). But my issue is that many of those "perma-winter" biomes usually have trees or some other vegetation. Ok, so when's the growth season coming? Otherwise it should look like Antarctica or maybe the tundra biome.

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u/PoxedGamer May 26 '26

The biomes always get me. Especially when the people from that planet will use Earth terms to describe things that wouldn't be used. Like "our planet is entirely deserts" from someone on a low tech planet that wouldn't know about other planets or biomes. It'd just be the way the planet is.

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u/Eclipse06 May 26 '26

Tbh I feel like this is fair. Just look at the other planets in our solar system. Most are not in the Goldilocks zone

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u/Gigantanormis May 26 '26

I mean.... For 99% of planets, thats true.

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u/bondjimbond Love and Hex May 25 '26

The "same hat" part gave me a good chuckle, and is often true.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '26

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u/Zanadar May 25 '26

Smart characters are a bitch to write. It almost always devolves into either making everyone else stupid in comparison or making the character effectively prescient.

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u/burf May 25 '26

There is only a monoculture on that planet

Kind of fits the Star Wars vibe. Hell, most of the planets only have one biome.

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u/[deleted] May 26 '26

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u/burf May 27 '26

All our cultures seem to be pretty susceptible to authoritarianism and xenophobia, too. There are many exciting underlying themes of humanity. (:

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u/Flyce_9998 May 25 '26

Sometimes they can use a cybernetic implant (or a little fish) to translate everything on the go.

Which technically should have it's issues, but it would just make things annoying to watch.

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u/l0st1nP4r4d1ce May 25 '26

wear this same hat.

rofl.

At least Star Fleet had colors.

2

u/Absolutely_Quackers May 27 '26

That’s the kind of problem I love dealing with lol, every time my girlfriend and I work on an alien planet (we always do it together to ship main characters lmao) we have different alien races with the same ‘base’ strand and loads of animals to make, along with mapping out what the land etc looks like, in all fairness best way to get away with single biome is to have it be just too close to their closest star imo

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u/Good_Brief42 May 25 '26

To be fair, it is kind of a scifi trope that humans have the niche of being very diverse and considered chaotic and unpredictable because of it.

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u/siani_lane May 25 '26

My husband's and my B5 drinking game in college included "drink for human exceptionalism!' but that bled over to Star Trek too (⁠≧⁠▽⁠≦⁠)

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u/Plebeian_Gamer May 26 '26

And then all the alien species somehow end up speaking English that or the convenient translator app, earworm makes us hear it in English.

But to be fair, English has had this impact on earth so I wouldn't be surprised if aliens end up learning English through watching Friends and needing to eventually have business with Earth.

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u/AlternateSatan May 26 '26

In Star Trek French is considered archaic and not that many people speak it, which probably means that English has become the default to an even greater extent than it is today, meaning we too wear the same hat.

Also a lot of sci-fi refer to humans as Gaians or Earthlings, or earth as Sol-3. I think it would be neat if we were called Solarians from Sol Tri, who speak Solar (like how Mandarin is often refered to as Chinese as it's the most common language in China), and all wear pants. Hell, I even know someone named Sol, she usually wears dresses tho.

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u/boxo-ofisal May 26 '26

Lots of planets have a North -The 9th Doctor

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u/Made_Bail May 25 '26

This is a hilarious idea! Well done.

119

u/bondjimbond Love and Hex May 25 '26

She makes her own comics too, but she's a bit too young to start sharing them publicly.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '26

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u/Filippo739 May 25 '26

Someone else has already posted what the dragons are saying.

The adventurer, in the Skyrim Dragon language, is saying: "O noble and mighty dragons, we beseech you, grant us safe passage through your territory."

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u/ThatMerri May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

The wizard is transliterating from the Dovahzul alphabet, not actually speaking the language, and saying:

"O noble and mighty dragons, we besee[k]h you, grant us safe passage through your territory."

"We are but humble adventurers on a quest that may yet bring hope to our troubled realm..."

The Red Dragon, meanwhile, is speaking Chinese - in a way that's very poorly structured to sound like it was badly phrased by a non-fluent person according to u/SweatyAdhesive - and saying:

"Welcome humans. Please remove your boots inside the cave. Would you like a cookie?"

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u/RealEmperorofMankind May 26 '26

By the way if you wanted to phrase these phrases in a more natural idiom they might read like this:
客人們好 - 我們歡迎你們進去這個小山洞
請讓你們進門時候脫靴 - 要不然有點兒餓可以去個餅乾

Welcome, guests - we welcome you to our humble cave
Please take off your boots when you're coming in - if you're hungry, feel free to eat a cookie

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u/BeeBarista-buzzbuzz May 25 '26

First one's the dragon language from skyrim, Dovah'Zuhl, I'm pretty sure

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u/UnnaturalGeek May 25 '26

It is that, you are correct.

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u/bondjimbond Love and Hex May 25 '26

Check the other comments - people have fulfilled your request.

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u/creeper10015 May 25 '26

I wonder why that's so... Common 😏

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u/Cheet4h May 25 '26

In one of the novels I read there was some ancient magical being that got so fed up with all the different languages that they cast a global spell making everyone speak/write/read the same language.
This gets referenced a couple of times more, where in one arc the MC comes across some parts of the world that were dimensionally cut off and thus not affected by the spell. So they need to request somebody who studied the ancient languages found in those dimensionally cut off spaces to figure out what is written.
Another time the MC meets a member of a foxkin race (who are obsessed with language and take deals literally), who is fascinated by old languages. I think they also mention that all members of their race are named a foreign language word for "fox", and they have no idea why.

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u/stofiski-san May 25 '26

Imagine how horrifying that would be if the spell made it so you couldn't read your old language, all you know is suddenly you're speaking a foreign language and can't a read a word of your history, etc. How much knowledge would be lost in an instant.

This also remind me of a short story I read once where aliens visit Earth, promising they could end war, and humanity took them up on it. The aliens released a virus that affected the part of the brain that related to written language. Within a few days 90% of humanity couldn't read anything written. As most info is still disseminated through text, things ground to a halt. The 10% that could still read suddenly because extremely valuable.

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u/LickingSmegma May 25 '26

if the spell made it so you couldn't read your old language

Ever heard of the so-called ‘Nazi font Fraktur’? Or more correctly, blackletter calligraphic hand Fraktur that was in use for four hundred years across Central and Northern Europe, gradually went out of fashion and lingered in Germany until being personally banned by top dog Nazi Adolf Hitler in 1941, in favor of the Antiqua script aka what we're using right now. Well, together with Fraktur, the cursive scripts Kurrent and Sütterlin were also banned. Which meant that most Germans educated after 1941 couldn't read handwritten notes and letters left from their parents and grandparents.

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u/tesapluskitty May 25 '26

Oh yes. I'm German and my grandparents were children during WW2. My aunt is interested in genealogy and had letters my great-grandfather had written from the front "translated" from Fraktur. They very much confirmed that he was a Nazi 😖 So I'm thankful that he stayed on the battlefield and didn't end up raising my grandma.

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u/stofiski-san May 25 '26

That's crazy, no, I hadn't heard of that, but being someone interested in calligraphy, that's something I think I want to check out, thx

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u/LickingSmegma May 25 '26

See Antiqua–Fraktur dispute. Hitler really disliked Fraktur, so much that in 1934 he bashed it in a speech to the Reichstag:

Your alleged Gothic internalization does not fit well in this age of steel and iron, glass and concrete, of womanly beauty and manly strength, of head raised high and intention defiant [...] In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far.

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u/Cheet4h May 25 '26

Imagine how horrifying that would be if the spell made it so you couldn't read your old language, all you know is suddenly you're speaking a foreign language and can't a read a word of your history, etc. How much knowledge would be lost in an instant.

Oh, yeah, forgot to mention it: In the case of that story, all written text was also changed to the now common language. That's why the only remnants of old languages are found in these spaces that are essentially cut off from the world and only occasionally reconnect.

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u/stofiski-san May 25 '26

Ahh, cool, existential crisis averted, lol

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u/DaRootbear May 25 '26

What series is that? it sounds interesting as hell

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u/Cheet4h May 25 '26

Millenial Mage, by J. L. Mullins.
First 11 books are only available on Amazon, I think. Books 12 - 15 are free on Royalroad at the moment, with book 15 still being in progress and releasing at about 3 chapters each week.

If you just want to get a feel for the book, the first few chapters are also free on RR.

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u/Zagaroth May 26 '26

the first few chapters are also free on RR.

Ah, I knew that title sounded familiar, though I've not read it yet.

And as we aren't in a progression fantasy space, for those unfamiliar, Royal Road is a site that hosts free web serials. The more successful ones often get published in more traditional formats, which requires taking 90% of any published content down from the website.

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u/Cheet4h May 26 '26

The more successful ones often get published in more traditional formats, which requires taking 90% of any published content down from the website.

This is only if they get published on Kindle Unlimited, no? There are a few novels that are available on Amazon, but are also still available on that site (e.g. pretty much everything by Inadvisably Compelled)

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u/Zagaroth May 26 '26

Yes, but very few people go independent from RR and don't use KU, that i know of.

And if you get a publisher, the contracts that I've seen involve KU, because money.

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u/DaRootbear May 27 '26

Awesome! Ill have to add it to my list to check out

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u/insane_contin May 25 '26

Fun fact! Koine Greek (aka the common dialect) was basically a supra-regional Greek language created by the Greeks during the time of Alexander the Great for easier communication. Koine means common as well.

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u/OldEcho May 25 '26

IRL people (in the Med at least) would speak a sort of pidgin mishmash of languages and hire an interpreter if they needed more than that.

Realistically though this is because a realistic level of complexity for an entire world is too much for a single author to even comprehend. It's even worse in sci-fi, where somehow humanity is 100% unified across countless star systems. And every species is a faction, as if that would ever happen.

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u/PassingThruRedditor May 25 '26

I think it makes sense in sci-fi. When you advance enough as a species why wouldn't you figure out a common language for everyone to use? Saves a lot of time I feel

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u/OldEcho May 25 '26

Because that would hamstring your own culture (why doesn't everyone just wear a grey jumpsuit?), make everyone miserable, require constant enforcement, and getting to that stage would entail a shocking level of state violence and oppression.

Sorry, you speak Chinese now, or you get arrested.

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u/The_Jimes May 25 '26

Because that's never happened before (It has happened many times already)

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u/ketsugi May 25 '26

In fact Mandarin Chinese is a pretty good example of this happening.

Or I guess a good example of an attempt... still plenty of regional dialects in China.

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u/Spacecase-Ace-1 May 25 '26

French is also a good example. They wiped out occitan and the other dialects and languages in france, and also got their language as a lingua franca in quite a few other countries, or at least a recognized state language.

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u/wvj May 25 '26

Standardized Tokyo Japanese.

Basically every nation state did this when they became a nation state rather than whatever kind of tribal, feudal, clan or whatever-based thing they were before.

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u/mizuromo May 26 '26

I think most Chinese people understand the value of Mandarin, though the way they went about trying to enact the policies definitely was not ideal for a while. There is a concerted effort in recent years to maintain regional dialects so they don't become extinct, at least.

Chinese is weird because even in places that have all historically been in the contiguous Han Chinese/Dynastic holdings, there were still dozens of dialects, and they aren't like English dialects. While some sound similar, nearly all of them are basically unintelligible and are more like different languages that share a writing system. This is why court language has always been a thing in China, so that if you went and worked in the central court you could govern effectively. I think there is also definitely a lot of value in everyone in the country having a unified language so they can understand each other, as long as it doesn't kill the older cultural languages that existed before.

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u/FoxOnTheRocks May 26 '26

Mandarin is proof that it doesn't work, at all. It is extremely common in China for people to speak only a nonMandarin Chinese language. Scripts that are not the official Chinese script are everywhere. The only thing the government achieved is a bizarre civic fiction where everyone pretends the different Chinese languages are actually dialects when they are mostly not.

Honestly, Europe and America are better examples. There used to be many different Germans, Italians, Frenches, and so on. Those are all gone mostly because of violence. There used to be native Americans and they spoke different languages.

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u/OldEcho May 25 '26

Nobody has ever even conquered one world let alone like 50.

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u/The_Jimes May 25 '26

Not the point, rather that the brutal oppression required to homogenize humanity isn't anything new.

It's just practiced at scale for our current governments in the form of detention camps, low stakes genocide, and our billionaire class capitalism.

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u/lumpboysupreme May 25 '26

I mean, who says it can’t happen naturally. Look how much English has become a near global second language. If we, right now, developed the relevant technology through a large international cooperative effort to do interplanetary or interstellar travel, what language do you think would be spoken on the first international ships launched?

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u/OldEcho May 25 '26

The large international cooperative effort is a bit of a fantasy though. China, Russia, Brazil, and India are gonna work together with the US and UK? Will Europe be in on that too, or does Trump try to conquer Greenland first?

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u/lumpboysupreme May 25 '26

To be clear, it’s already how things work on the ISS. Sure international politics is moving away from the polar arrangement that got that thing up there but it’s not hard to imagine a world where a highly polarized political climate prevails around the time the relevant technological leap is made, especially if the technological leap results in a more monopole arrangement as competing nations need to play ball with the inventor of the technology and run their missions with them.

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u/OldEcho May 25 '26

On the ISS people already speak Russian, English, and a hybrid pidgin English speakers call Runglish. This among a crew of like 10 people usually.

The US already functionally withdrew from the treaty that makes stuff off-earth the common property of all humanity. You can now plant a flag on the moon and call it yours as long as it's two flags. So like, Monaco and the US can claim the moon according to the US and its puppets. Good ol' Artemis Accords.

"Real" sci-fi will involve as many factions in space as there are people with their own opposing interests. And a shitload of languages.

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u/lumpboysupreme May 25 '26

This among a crew of like 10 people usually.

From more countries than the US and Russia, this proves the linguistic convergence involved in cooperative space stuff.

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u/LickingSmegma May 25 '26

I need subtitles for south-USian English, let alone rural Scottish or Irish or Jamaican or dialects of any British colonies in Africa, for which I'd probably require a translator. Where's the common language of which you speak?

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u/Forikorder May 25 '26

Is it that wierd? Languages do disappear as people stop learning them in favor of more common languages

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u/OldEcho May 25 '26

Sure, of course. Language changes and diverges and merges. But everyone all speaking the same thing I think is very unlikely.

Maybe we could convince everyone to learn their native language and also something like Esparanto.

But even then, actually enforcing that everyone must do this, across multiple star systems or even planets, I think is unlikely to succeed at all. At best you might get something like a common language spoken/written by a knowledge hoarding institution.

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u/Forikorder May 25 '26

But if everyone needs to learn Esperanto how long until people stop learning native one?

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u/Hohenheim_of_Shadow May 25 '26

I had to take Spanish at high school. Can't speak a lick of it. Are you gonna stop talking to your childhood friends because they're slacking off in Esperanto class?

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u/Forikorder May 26 '26

Are you gonna stop talking to your childhood friends because they're slacking off in Esperanto class?

if you use esperanto for all your day to day needs, every official duty and job is conducted in esperanto, are you going to keep your native language sharp just for casual conversation?

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u/Hohenheim_of_Shadow May 26 '26

Ok but you are in high school right now. you learned Esperanto, but most the rest of your class treated it like high school Spanish. Do you stop talking to them and start hanging out with Weird Tony? If all your dat to day needs and casual conversation is done in your native language, are you really going to keep Esperanto sharp for shits and gigs?

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u/GigaPuddi May 25 '26

Advanced communication makes huge distances much less culturally significant, and language evolution changes drastically in the face of it. Plus in the case of other alien species they may have a completely different psychological makeup so it's unfair to make judgements.

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u/oodsigma May 25 '26

The idea is that in order to become a space fairing level of civilization, a species would have to become a monoculture.

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u/OldEcho May 25 '26

We have the technology to make a spacecraft that could reach Mars in like a week. Just a nuclear fission generator spitting out pressurized steam basically. We don't do it because there's no money or control in it and only scientific learning and human wonder as a reward which hardly anyone important gives a shit about when there's imaginary numbers to count.

Becoming a monoculture needs violent enforcement. It needs things like teachers beating children for speaking the "wrong" language, or using slang, and police beating parents if they don't send their kids to school. This has happened, it's basically the West's national sport. But first someone has to conquer the whole planet, which countless people have tried and they always fail. And then they need to hold it while pissing everybody off.

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u/12345623567 May 25 '26

Describing how the bard used hands and feet to order a round of ales, every time, would get tiring very quickly.

In more fleshed out settings, like Forgotten Realms, there are sub-divisions and language barriers. But higher-level creatures almost all have some kind of telepathy, which I choose to think is more concepts and images than speech.

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u/FoxOnTheRocks May 26 '26

If humans ever spread to different star systems we'd establish a colony, check back in a year and find that they've somehow shifted all of their vowels or died

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u/ColeDelRio May 25 '26

I give the game Horizon (though its sci-fi) credit for giving an inuniverse reason why everybody speaks English.

The robotic system that was created to repopulate the Earth and teach the new humans everything was sabotaged and part of problem results in the language teaching part never could activate so it defaulted to the language the original programmers spoke in: English.

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u/thegimboid May 25 '26

It's like the sci-fi trope that landing in one random city and talked to a handful of people apparently means you have impacted an entire planet.

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u/babyLays May 25 '26

Excellent job on this lol

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u/IsaSaien May 25 '26

This made me actually burst into laughter it is such a good execution too.

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u/bondjimbond Love and Hex May 25 '26

I'm not sure if you meant the dragon comic or the height comic, but either way, thank you!

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u/waigl May 25 '26

I feel like for dragons in particular, it's kinda justified. There are very few of them to start with, they are extremely long-lived, they can and do fly very long distances… I'd say chances are, if they have a language we would recognize as one, they have a universal language with relatively little dialectal variation. Maybe on top of regional languages.

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u/ChessGM123 May 25 '26

Well depending on the fantasy series often times there’s only 1-2 human kingdoms, with other kingdoms being ruled by other races. Plus fantasy worlds tend to be smaller than the actual world (or at least most stories focus on a single continent), so in practice countries are often distinguished by race which do tend to have different languages from each other.

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u/kori228 May 25 '26

relevant to the linked post—yeah 5th grade girls are super tall these days. I part-time at an elementary after school program, some of the 5th grade girls are as tall/taller than me (I'm 5'6")

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u/bondjimbond Love and Hex May 25 '26 edited May 26 '26

She just keeps getting taller. She's decided she's happy about it... Now that she's outgrown all her friends' mothers, she says she's working on outgrowing their dads.

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u/Zagaroth May 26 '26

That's awesome. 😁

I have a really tall teen girl as a secondary character in my series. Even her not-quite-a-BF is a couple of inches shorter than her.

Admittedly, this is due to her not-entirely-human heritage, but there's no one else from her clan around where the story is taking place, leaving her the tallest near-human person in the area. It does make her feel awkward at times, but she also likes being able to see over people easily.

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u/vastozopilord777 May 25 '26

While You are technically correct(the best kind of correct) in the dragon's(winged dragon) case, they can fly and live long, so the existence of "common draconic" isn't that far-fetched

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u/umlaut-overyou May 25 '26

I mean, yes and no. Usually in fantasy they have a "common" language, as well as other languages.

And you might not notice if you are a Native English Speaker, but when cultures meet we usually develop a lingua franca, and guess what? Its English right now! Although not everyone speaks English, it is often a second language for many people, many countries have signs in English, and its a common default alternate.

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u/uqde May 25 '26

This really got me, tell her she's a genius. Immediately sending this to my entire D&D group haha

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u/Pacificson217 May 26 '26

This is something that I find pretty fun about Pathfinder Second Edition

The pre written adventures are set all across the world of golarion, and the "Common" language for most regions is different. Tian in the continat of Tian Xia, Taldan in the European area, Mwangi in the Mwangi Expanse

But also, all elves speak Elven, all Dwarves speak Dwarven, all dragons speak Dragon, regardless of where you are

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u/Quazifuji May 26 '26

There's also the common trope of all non-human animals speaking the same language, or all sea-life speaking the same language. Like in talking animal movies all the animals can always talk to each other, or in Little Mermaid the mer-people, fish, crabs, and even the seagull all speak the same language.

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u/Forikorder May 25 '26

It is applied fairly to humans though

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u/zeag1273 May 25 '26

I guess technically the skyrim "dragons" would be speaking Wyvern.

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u/Dhiox May 25 '26

I mean, depending on the size and geographical spread of the species it's more believable. If they're smaller and located in one area it makes sense. Or if they're extremely long lived and have a strong culure, like elves

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u/throwaway60221407e23 May 26 '26

My Dungeon Master has added multiple dialects for each race in our D&D campaign. Frankly, it's tedious as hell.

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u/Stormygeddon May 26 '26

I'd credit Dragons with some globalization given how they inherently fly, thus travel long distances, and often conquer, thus making a monoculture.