LANGUAGES IN MY D&D

 

As I'd mentioned in my welcome post, one of my great interests is in language and linguistics. I'm bilingual by training, speaking both English (my native tongue) and French (twelve years of study).

I also like to dabble in learning aspects of other languages through reading books about them and Duolingo, During COVID I develped an abiding interest in conlangs (constructed languages).

I've always felt that languages were a missed opportunity in D&D. Yes, there are a variety of languages and spells meant to help bridge any linguistic gap (i.e., Comprehend Languages). But languages rarely, if ever, play a significant role in D&D.

I certainly understand why. Most players of D&D are not language nerds by nature, And it sucks, from an RPG perspective, for players to get stuck because no one knows the language of the current creature or place you're dealing with. Are there useful ways around this? I think so. Among the projects I'm working on are 5E rules for language acquisition and dealing with foreign / mixed language environments.

I'm about to start a private, online D&D game for my library colleagues. We're going to start out playing in Ravnica. The City of Guilds is supposed to be based on Prague as a fantasy ecumenopolis. As a result, I've decided to introduce some re-skinned real world languages as actual in-game tongues (for flavor). 

Those two languages are the classical language Ravonèse (based on Czech) and the common tongue of Ravi (based on Esperanto). Here are some examples of both in use:

RAVI

Ravnica estas la Urbo de Gildoj kaj Ravi estas ĝia Komuna Lingvo.

(Ravnica is the City of Guilds. and Ravi is its Common Tongue)

Some Phrases

• Ravnica  pronounced RAV-NIK-A
• Hello!  Saluton!
• How are you?   Kiel vi fartas?
• Please.  Bonvolu.
• Thank you.  Dankon.
• You're welcome.   Nedankinde.
• Yes.   Jes. (pronounced the same as in English)
• No.   Ne.
• Goodbye!   Ĝis revido!

RAVONÈSE

Ravnica je město cechů a ravonèse je jeho klasický jazyk.

(Ravnica is the City of Guilds, and Ravonèse is its classical language.)

Some Phrases

• Ravnica.  pronounced RAV-NEET-SA
• Hello!   Dobrý den!
• How are you?   Jak se máš?
• Please.   Prosím.
• Thank you. Děkuju.
• You're welcome. Nemáš zač
• Yes.   Ano.
• No.   Ne.
• Goodbye!  Nashledanou!

The idea here is often to use real-world languages to represent in-game languages. This is not new to D&D. It was common practice in the Basic setting, Mystara (see the discussions about this on the Vaults of Pandius). 

What I think is helpful here for roleplaying purposes is to use a smattering of common expressions in the target language to get "the feel" of the language without the added burden of actually having to learn the language. A similar approach can be adopted for the use of entirely fantasy languages alongside them,

Finally, a word about the plane's name. Ravnica is an actual word in Serbian. It means Plains -- which is the MTG land type associated with cities and civilization in-game! Go figure.