Linguistic Drift in Scarterra

The language of "Common"

Assuming you are a Scarterran human. The farther you travel from home, the weirder people will sound, and the more pronounced accents become, until eventually you can't understand them at all.   As of the writing of this article, the primary setting that is most developed lore-wise is West Colassia, specifically the central portion of the continent. There is linguistic drift within West Colassia. Major human groups native to West Colassia include Kantoca, Jórtoca, Uskalan humans, Talaman humans, Fumayan humans, Borderlander humans, Swynfaredian humans, and a couple more.     Still, these human groups don't have any serious problems understanding each other, but when two humans of different groups talk, unless a person is a very good actor, their accent is probably going to give away where someone was born and raised. If a human leaves West Colassia and crosses the sea to another landmass, he or she will find that the other humans are basically speaking a separate language altogether though the foreigners have a few cognates in common.   There are five widely recognized linguistic families of Common: West Colassian Common, East Colassian Common, Penarchian Common, Umeran Common, and so called Equatorial Common which stretches across the various smaller islands and the very large Island of Khemarok.  

The "universal" Dwarven language

  Dwarves are longer lived than humans, so their generations are longer. This and other factors leads to dwarves generally being more conservative than humans, so their language evolves more slowly than human languages do. But Scarterran dwarves have been around much longer than Scarterran humans have, so they had more time to have their language diverge a fair bit, at least in one noteworthy event.   After the Second Unmaking, only two dwarven population enclaves survived. The ancestors of the Meckelorner dwarves and Penarchian dwarves. The two groups have a common origin, but they been out of contact for over two millennia, so they essentially speak entirely different languages now. In fact, the groups only recently found out that the other group definitively exists. For centuries they thought the stories of exotic foreign dwarves on the other side of the world was a human sailor's tall tale.     Even though the Mondarian dwarves and Penarchian dwarves are relatively close to each other geographically, but they are still removed culturally. Their tongues are too different to be considered the same language. A tiny number of dwarves on both sides have started the effort to learn the other tribe's tongue, but efforts at even partial cultural reunification remains painfully slow.  

The "universal" Gnomish language

  Gnome generations almost twice as long as human generations so this should slow down gnomes' linguistic drift, but the gnomes have an extremely dispersed population with a lot of cultural variation and this has always been the case for thousands of years.     Despite attempts to keep High Gnomish "pure", each major continent of Scarterra has its own dialect of High Gnomish which are understandable between each other but still distinct.   Most gnomish children learn High Gnomish from a young age while concurrently learning whatever the dominant local non-Gnomish language is. Thus, it is very common for gnome families and communities to switch back and forth when talking to each other or mix and match. Much like many bilingual American Latino families speak "Spanglish". When Gnomes do this, it is called "Conversational Gnomish".   Conversational Gnomish is a mishmash of High Gnomish melded with words, phrases, idioms, and grammar from other languaged. There dozens if not hundreds of variants of Conversational Gnomish.  

The "common" language of Grauen

  Greymoria has created more mortal races than the rest the Nine put together or if not quite that many, close to it. Most of Greymoria's mortal races created are now extinct or exist in small numbers in isolated pockets on the fringes of Scarterra and Scarnoctis.   Greymoria teaches her children Grauen. The language of Grauen has extremely pronounced linguistic drift, either because Greymoria can't stop it or doesn't care to stop it.   There is a "original" or "pure" version of Grauen that any scholar can look up in a book if they want to and a young mortal race created by Greymoria is going to speak a language very similar to this. The older a Grauen speaking race, the more pronounced their linguistic drift is.   Any Greymoria-created races that dates back to the First Age that is still around in the Third Age has more or less completely lost any trace of their original Grauen.   Greymoria-created races created during the Second Age are a mixed bag. Arachpliza have a conservative society that views speaking Grauen correctly as an act of devotion to their Dark Mother, so they speak a relatively pure dialect of Grauen. They are the exception that proves the rule. Most of Greymoria's other spiritual children of similar age to the Arachpliza only have small bits of their original Grauen.   Zocatec, spoken camazotz and kalazotz, is technically derived from Grauen but it's so far removed only a skilled linguist can spot the cognates. Zocatec has evolved to utilize a lot of phonemes and noises that bat people can produce that non-bat people cannot easily vocalize and they completely lost all the Grauen words that are hard for the bat folk to pronounce.   As the camazotz and kalazotz grow farther apart, their linguistic differences become larger. Eventually this will diverge into two different languages. Right now they can understand each other, but their dialects are very noticeable. Even within the camazotz race and within the kalazotz race, distinct dialects are starting to form. Codenya kalazotz and dwarf influenced kalazotz are especially distinct from each other.     On the more extreme end, in ancient times, goblins were culturally forced to learn Elven and only have retained a couple Grauen curses.   Only a few hundred words of the tengku's lost language are still remembered. Scholars debate whether or not this language is a Grauen derivative or something else, but since the language is mostly forgotten, no one will likely ever know for sure. Most modern tengku don't really care.  

Draconic and Elven language are very resistant to change

  Dragons and elves both have a variation Inborn language vocabulary though dragons have a much stronger variation of this unique ability. Races with this trait are born with some words innately. Dragons are born with a working vocabulary of roughly 20,000 words and elves are born with a working vocabulary 2,000 words.   Even if an elf baby is stolen from its parents and raised by non-elves, they will know 2,000 words of the Elven language. A lot of dragons, choose to abandon their eggs and leave the children to fend for themselves for several years before claiming them as offspring...if they ever claim them at all.   Even 20,000 words won't cover everything , and 2,000 words doesn't cover a lot, but no matter how far or how long different cultural groups of dragons or elves drift apart, these so called "core words" will never change. Both races are long-lived and fairly conservative so their linguistic drift is slow for the non-core words, but these races have been around for so long that linguistic drift is certainly a thing.   A lot of ancient races were forced to adopt the Draconic language as their own tongue, and the surviving members of these races have since evolved distinctive dialects, but they at least have most of the 20,000 core words in common...mostly. Though these words are not innate to most non-dragons, the ancient dragons got upset when their subjects didn't use them. To a lesser extant, this same principle applies to ancient races that elves forced to take their language.     At the height of the Second Age, there were a great many distinct dialects of Elven language, but a treaty between several powerful elven kings and queens (with an assist from the Keepers, Guardians, and Masks) established a "common trade tongue" with standardized grammar and vocabulary. The ancient elves used their local variants in their own homelands but used "the trade tongue" when conducting business and trade across national and ethnic lines.   During the Second Unmaking, most of the larger bands of survivors were made up of different nations and tribes, so most of them fell back on "the trade tongue" and most of their original dialects were forgotten. Most, but by no means all of the ancient writings of the Second Age that survived the Second Unmaking were written in the trade tongue.