It’s always so disappointing when sci fi and fantasy books call their languages “Basic” or “Common”. No language is apolitical or universal if they’re all calling one language Basic, who made it that way? Why is THIS dialect “Common” and all the others are Special/Magical/Incomprehensible??? Show me even a hint of the politics, or give your language a real name
I know of one case:
The native term for Standard Mandarin Chinese used in mainland China is 普通话, which translates to “Common Speech”. In Taiwan, it’s the similarly generic 国语, “National Language”.
They’re all speaking Chinese.
(Though to be clear, Mandarin is not politically neutral at all!)
Mandarin’s a really useful illustrative case though, because both those names are relatively recent, stemming from the revolution and civil war, and the attempts to form a more unified national identity
Using a common language was a major part of that, and the name reflects that politics, exactly as @runawaymarbles suggests
If more worlds with a “common” or “basic” leant into this and discussed the hegemony implied by it I don’t think there’d be any complaint
Prior to these names, Mandarin was known as 官話 Guānhuā “officials’ speech” (which the name Mandarin is a calque of)
Right. It is very political. And this is further complicated by the larger construct of “Chinese” which is taken as one language when linguistically we can divide it into several mutually-unintelligible groups.
Really, if there is a language that everyone in your world (or within a region) can speak, you’ve got a couple of situations that could be happening:
- There is a massive imperial power that is imposing its language. It doesn’t need to necessarily have massive education and language promotion efforts like a modern nation-state does. It just has to be powerful enough that people will want to learn the language to access power and economic opportunity.
- There’s a massive trade network where one language has become the default for doing business. The language could be one of a hegemonic power, but it could also be a creole or the language of a particular group with a lot of mobility and trade relationships that doesn’t necessarily control a lot of territory.
All of these languages are going to have relationships to power, and you can have much more complicated structure, where you have a regional lingua franca that’s different from the imperial or global lingua franca, or language used among tradespeople being different from the lingua franca of the intelligentsia. It would be lovely to see more authors think through this. You don’t even have to do much conlanging if you’re writing a book about it.
I’m still writing my Tron 1982 fanfic assuming the common language is BASIC
(half-joking. because it might not be BASIC, there is that little scene where some background extras are discussing how they’re gonna talk to a character who “doesn’t speak FORTRAN”)