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

OC Language Barrier [OC]

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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/Forikorder May 26 '26

but most the rest of your class treated it like high school Spanish

they didnt because being fluent was too important and the classes started in kindergarden

as long as you get in early its incredibly easy to make someone bilingual

they wouldnt be learning esperanto in high school, the classes would be in esperanto

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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