Building the World: Language

2018 Goals Update
Books read: 23
Words on LIBRARIUM: 4,646/4,646 (It's finally dONE THANK GOODNESS)
Words on BRUSHSTROKES: 1,020/? (probably around 80-85K)

I finally feel like I'm back in the saddle as far as writing goes. The last couple of weeks have been lackluster as far as my creative work--day job stuff has taken up more of my time and I've, frankly, been lazy and distractable.

One of the things I've been doing while not getting words on the page is playing Dragon Age: Inquisition (which is my least favorite of the DA games, but we no longer have a working controller for our Xbox 360, so it's the only option right now).

For those unfamiliar, Dragon Age is a series of fantasy role playing games (we know how I love my RPGS) set on the fictional continent of Thedas. This is, in general, a meticulously crafted world. The various nations each have their own history and sets of relationships and political structures. Each location has its own architectural style and fashion, its own set of norms and hobbies. It really is spectacularly well thought-out.

Except for one thing.

Language is one of the aspects of world building that I don't think gets the attention it deserves. And I guess, in some ways, I get it. Not all of us are Tolkien. Most of us don't particularly want to sit down and create an entire fictional language (you don't actually have to do that to have quality language world building--but I'll get to that later).

It's pretty easy to wave away language in settings that involve multiple countries or planets by saying that everyone speaks "Common"--I mean, that's the one language that your character automatically knows D&D. But just saying that there's a shared tongue ignores the way that language intertwines with history and politics.

Basically, a language doesn't just become common. It's a process that's wrapped up in economic and colonial relationships.

Allow me to get sociological for a minute.

What are some of the situations where a language becomes widespread? Which of our fictional nations' languages would be the one most likely to be picked up and used in other countries?

The languages of colonial powers tend to be more widespread. English is spoken around the world in no small part because for a while the English national pass-time was sailing around the world, conquering nations and making the native peoples speak and behave in an Anglicized manner. England's not the only example--the story of how Spanish became the dominant language in so many Central and South American nations is pretty similar. What nations or world in your fictional setting have the itch to claim land in other nations or on other planets? The colonized often have to learn the language of their colonizers. Which language is "common" will in some ways be a matter of which nation has power.

Trade will also have an impact on what languages people learn. Which nation holds the economic power? Who controls the shipping lines? If you want to make money--if you want to be able to trade with other nations, to expand your markets--you have to learn that nation's language. Again, power is at play. The nation (or group or whatever) that controls the trade lines doesn't need to learn others' languages because they are the folks you have to go through to make money. They're needed and as such they can dictate terms. Learn our language if you want access. Take it or leave it.

It seems like such a little thing, but something as simple as what language is most commonly spoken can add so much detail to a fictional world. Ignoring this part of world building pokes a hole in your world's history.

Now, when it comes to fictional languages--I definitely get the unwillingness to craft an entire language. I know some basic structural things about my alien species' languages in my space opera, but I don't have a dictionary or anything like that. But I don't necessarily need to have one. I wrote the whole book, even scenes that are spoken in one of the fictional languages, in English. With a few hints, the reader can assume what language is being spoken.

Movies do this all the time. US adaptations for Les Miserables, for instance, are typically scripted in English, but we don't assume that all of these 19th century French folks are actually speaking English. The same idea can apply for a fictional language. An author can drop some clues--mention the setting and origins of the characters, say something about the familiarity of a language or if someone struggles to find a word, or even flat out say that someone is speaking in a particular language--to plant the idea of what language is being spoken in the reader's mind. No need to come up with a new language. Unless you just want to.

Every aspect of your world is a chance to make the reader's experience of it more complete. Language is no exception.

So, maybe take some extra time to think about who's speaking what and why.

Context

I wasn’t going to write this post. At least, I wasn’t going to write it yet. I'm going to say some too-big-for-my-britches things about creative responsibility. I wanted to wait until I had a following that reached beyond my family and friends, but I felt like this was the time to talk about this.

I’ve mentioned before that my background is a mix of communication studies and sociology. I’m teaching a summer session of Mass Media and Society this summer, so I’ve spent a lot of time in the past week talking about identity and representation.

The crux of the course, the main thing that I’m trying to communicate to my students, is that art is never just art. In other words, it’s never just a game or just a movie. It’s a cultural shorthand. There are myriad social experiences that a single viewer/reader/player will never experience, so the mediated version of these experiences become the reality—I may never travel to Paris, but I’ve seen movies set there, and I’ve read books about Paris and Parisian life. For me, those representations make up the entirety of my view of what Paris is like.

We have a very specific view of artists in our society—the lone, starving artist, dedicated to their vision. We frame art as something that comes solely from within and is put into the world.

This, honestly, is a load of crap.

I don’t mean to imply that creative endeavor is impersonal, because obviously the desire to create and the things we choose to spend our time on are personal. But this notion that an artist’s creations aren’t informed by the world they live in is flat-out wrong.

People don’t live in a vacuum. The world that we live in and our social identities shape our experiences. My experiences and point of view as an American are going to translate into the things that I create—in a legal sense, I’m allowed to address topics that writers in other parts of the world can’t, and in a social sense, the things that I think are important are going to be defined by my context (for instance, my sociological background gives me a different set of tools with which to address issues than might be available to someone with a background in, say, physics). What we know, the body of information or ideas that we have to pull from, depends on our social context.

One of the second main themes of my class is that, while we can certainly be critical of media constructions and representations, we do have to acknowledge the degree to which they can present certain things as normal.

The media sell us ideas about what “normal American life” looks like. We tend to see the same patterns in our media narratives. Spend a couple of minutes on TV Tropes (you won’t just spend a couple of minutes; that site is a time-eater), and you’ll see that creative works tend to go back to some of these same safe patterns. Which is not necessarily a bad thing—it gives people something familiar to latch on to, and that can ease the whole story-telling process.

But there are a lot of tropes surrounding identity.

“Far-East Asian Terrorists”

“Inscrutable Oriental”

“Mammy”

“Scary Black Man”

“Cure Your Gays”

“Discount Lesbians”

“Entitled to Have You”

“Females Are More Innocent”

And those are just some of the ones related to racial identity and gender/sexual identity.  

We see characters presented in certain ways over and over again—to the exclusion of other presentations. It normalizes these presentations. If you’re shown over and over again “this is what these people are like,” then, at a certain point, if you don’t see anything else, you accept that presentation.

Art isn’t consumed in a vacuum, either. Our readers/viewers/players also approach our work from within their context. And it’s very possible that their context has been shaped by some problematic things.

I’ve been thinking about my responsibility as someone who creates. I don’t like being told what I can and can’t do with a story more than anyone else, but it’s becoming clearer to me that I have to examine the context into which I’m releasing my work. What are some of the notions that I take for granted? That my readers take for granted? What’s shaping some of my story decisions, and do these decisions help or hurt the group that I’m trying to present?

I’m not perfect—obviously. I will inevitably slip up and produce pieces that are ignorant or hurtful. But if I don’t want my work to be used as an excuse to say “hey, all of group x are this way”—and let’s be clear, I don’t want that—then I have to take responsibility. I have to examine my context.