#pidgin language

[m1dori-eyes]

Be wary of linguistics rant, Elden Ring ahead

Ok so I just made a different post about this but I need to elaborate: The Elden Ring messaging system is legitimately such an interesting microcosm about how language is used as a tool and shaped to suit the needs it's being used for. I could actually make an entire study about how this can be used to better understand the formation of pidgin languages in the same way that epidemiologists studied the Corrupted Blood Incident in World of Warcraft to better understand the mechanics of how disease affects human behavior. Video games as an academic lens into peoples' minds has always been a fascinating topic to me, and by the end of this, you'll see why.

First off, message.

So for those not indoctrinated into the series/game, Elden Ring is a big open world game made by From Software, which won game of the year 2022 among some other awards (if you've played it or know anything about it, just skip to the next header). Each player plays as a Tarnished and explores this massive environment called The Lands Between individually, but if another player is walking in the same area that you are, you can see their "ghost" moving through the world, and you can "invade" or "be summoned" into another player's iteration of the world in order to briefly interact with it before returning to your own iteration. This occupies a weird space in between singleplayer and multiplayer, with these heavily limited and kind of random methods of interaction between players, but that's not the most interesting way of communicating with your fellow Tarnished; that title goes to the messages system. You can write a message onto a small stone, and leave it on the ground, and then that little stone with the message on it will have a random chance to appear in any player's iteration of the world for them to read. This is a tradition which has been going in From Software's games long since before the inception of Elden Ring, although I'm mostly going to be focusing on the message system of that title, because documenting the history of the 13+ years running Soulsbourne franchise is way too much, even for a nerd like me. The point is that messages are a lot more likely to be seen than any other method of player-to-player interaction, and you can even leave little "gestures" to go with them, where the reader can see your character striking a pose while they read the message. What a neat little mechanic, which definitely doesn't have any hidden layers of depth, and certainly wouldn't spawn an entire emergent system of pseudolinguistics, right?

No message ahead, be wary of mimicry

Well, when I said that messages are written by other players, that was a lie. To make a message, you don't type it out with your keyboard, you select what you want to say, from a big list of preset phrases. It works that way for a lot of reasons, foremost of all as a profanity filter, but also to prevent too many spoilers and maintain atmosphere. The sets of phrases are incredibly limiting, famously requiring players to use weird fake old-english diction in order to express a simple thought (Strong foe ahead, be weary of death. Look carefully ahead, visions of item. Suffering, o suffering, why is it always bad luck? etc). This seems like a limitation which would put a serious damper on anyone trying to actually communicate their thoughts, but gamers are a persistent sort, and have a lot of trouble taking no for an answer. They also have way too much time on their hands, and like to solve puzzles, a terrifying combination of traits, and the perfect one to accidentally create a conlang. With the unexpectedly massive audience that this game picked up on launch, millions of people left messages desperately trying to get something across, and if the game's preset vocabulary didn't contain the phrases to express it, they would forge their own path. Any big fans of linguistic history can already tell the direction that this might be going, as we move on into the next chapter:

Teacher, Liar, Lovable Sort

When the game released, there was chaos. The Lands Between are fraught with hidden passages, deception, and blatant bullshit, and the first kind of players leaving messages tried to helpfully communicate what you could trust, and what you couldn't. This is what the message system was intended for after all, giving advice to your peers, and what many people still use it for today. The second kind of players tried to do the opposite, deliberately leading people to their doom, just because they could. The third, and most numerous sort, were simply awestruck at everything the game had to offer, and left a series of remarks on the beauty and humor of the world. The messages left by each group are pretty easy to differentiate to the trained eye, which is the main feature causing me to point out this division of players. Let's call these groups the teachers, the liars, and the lovable sorts. A teacher can be recognized if their messages suggest something within reason, and being backed up by the peer-review of nearby messages to the same effect. If three messages are all sitting on the ground next to eachother, each saying something along the lines of "seek up, look carefully ahead", then a local collage of teachers are trying to let you know about a secret path ahead leading you up towards a hidden objective. However, a single message next to a bloodstained cliff-edge stating "jumping required ahead" is almost certainly a liar, trying to deceive an unsuspecting player into making a dubious leap. Liars sometimes use slightly simpler grammar than teachers do, being less committed to getting their point across. Wait a minute, linguistic variance based on intent? No no, this is just a video game about fighting monsters, surely such an interesting emergent system wouldn't arise from something like that. Lastly, the lovable sorts have the most ranging grammar, spanning from a simple word such as "dog" (a word used colloquially to describe all creatures, from turtles to dragons), to complex sentences requiring the combination of many phrases. However, a lovable sort can be differentiated by the fact that they merely remark upon the world as it is, instead of trying to offer advice to other players, as a teacher or liar might. Some of their most iconic phrases are "Elden ring ahead", used to sarcastically denote a dead end where a player might have been expecting treasure, "you don't have the right, o, you don't have the right" which indicates a locked door, or the world-famous "try finger, but hole", a phrase which explains itself. The most incredible thing about the words of the lovable sort, is that they all require a little bit of thinking to understand their actual meaning, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes like a second language to you! Wait a minute, a second language?

Message? Wasn't expecting introspection

As time went on, the three main groups of message-writers still kept chugging along, creating new works of writing every day, but advancements in understanding of the game's inner workings allowed these messages to become more and more complex. Compound words started to be formed to represent concepts outside of the preset vocabulary, like "skeleton, house" for coffin, "dung, key" to describe the donkeys accompanying traveling merchants, and "edge, lord" being used to refer to the NPC Ensha, a man wearing flamboyant armor made out of bones who takes himself way too seriously. It's worth noting in this section that for a specific period of time, The Lands Between were overtaken by a horde of messages stating only the words "fort, night". Despite the crude and humorous nature of the entire thing, it was clear to see that the linguistic patterns of the Elden Ring community were evolving into their own beast, far beyond the usages that the developers had intended. Words had shed their original meaning, to instead take up contextual meanings based on how players used them, effectively becoming different words entirely. Depending on how you define this, it's either a microcosm of incredibly fast and severe linguistic drift, or the emergence of a new pidgin or conlang entirely. If you really stretch things, you could almost call the message system of Elden Ring an entirely new language in and of itself.

Well done, victory ahead!

I think that video games are an excellent way to observe human behavior under conditions which are controlled, accelerated, and completely recordable, and this is the closest that we've ever seen to an entire language growing completely from scratch. People are always the same, whether you want to call it instinct or just cyclical tendencies, but normally the formation of a new language can take incredible periods of time, hastened only by tragic events like diaspora or massive losses of cultural knowledge (research what's been happening to Gaelic as a spoken language for more info about this sort of thing, it's kind of depressing but is also important to learn about, and there's a lot of people on this site talking about it who can do the topic way more justice than I can). Even for other topics which either require great passage of time, or great tragedy in order to research (I.E. geology or epidemiology, respectively), there are a lot of simulations and predictive models which can tell us how these systems behave without actually experiencing them. Linguistics has never had this sort of thing...until now, perhaps. Obviously there won't be any academic breakthroughs based on a bunch of people online all writing "rump ahead", but it's an incredibly interesting thing to see happening for a field which is so hard to actively advance, and it could lead to actual scientific methods of generating new languages via human interaction for research purposes. Of course, there's always the sizable chance that this goes nowhere and I just wrote this insane rant because I like to type, but if nothing else, I at the very least exposed some of my mutuals to "try finger, but hole".

[ranahan]

Just had to share this turn of phrase with the rest of the linguistics tumblr.

In John Holm (2004), An introduction to pidgins and creoles. Cambridge University Press.

[embodimentofscarletdipshit]

mutuals-- i'm working on a linguistics experiment just out of curiosity! wanna join?

So the whole purpose is to kind of see how people's worldviews are different based on how they phonetically spit out a new word. like, oh, you would say "tree" as (xxxxxx)? i personally think it would be (yyyyyyyy.)or something. and if someone comes up with the same word for two different concepts-- why? how do culture, personal preferences, and more play a role?

i'm not working on a thesis or anything, it's just a good opportunity to psychoanalyze random strangers i guess.

also: the language viossa gave me this idea.

[newvegascowboy]

Ok so i personally believe that interstate trade in the wasteland is alive and well, especially along the coasts, but there HAS to be some like. Linguistic weirdness happening in the wasteland. With radio communication, I'm sure there's a "standard english" that prevents a lot of people from getting tooooo granular of a dialect, but it doesn't take that long for languages to change, really. Where are the pidgin languages? The new expressions? The funny sayings? The things that no vault dweller would understand because they come from an entirely different culture?

You'd probably have a lot of languages that are related, like the romance languages, or even Esperanto, where someone can parse the meaning even if they aren't a native speaker. Lots of English/Spanish variants of course, but can you imagine giving the Appalachian dialect 200 years to marinate? Cajun? Minnesotan?? The people in the Commonwealth should be speaking like theyre from another planet. The sole survivor is talking like a Jane Austen novel, unable to comprehend the words a Bostonian mind has had 200 years to come up with.

[glitchedgirly]

Every day on Qsmp, they get closer and closer to speaking their own type of Pidgin

[ph4nt-mp]

I see your Scottish pirate-accented Wind, and I raise you my hawaiian pidgin english-accented Wind

[salroka]

Headcanon that most Vashoth communities speak a creole language that's a blend of common and qunlat.

[kemetic-dreams]

The language emerged from contact between French settlers and enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

Although its vocabulary largely derives from 18th-century French, its grammar is that of a West African Volta-Congo language branch, particularly the Fongbe and Igbo languages. It also has influences from Spanish, English, Portuguese, Taino, and other West African languages. 

It is not mutually intelligible with standard French, and has its own distinctive grammar. Haitians are the largest community in the world speaking a modern creole language, according to some sources. 

However, this is disputable, as Nigerian Pidgin, an English-based Creole language, is attested by some sources to have a larger number of speakers than that of Haitian Creole and other French-based Creole languages, particularly if non-native speakers are included.

[rustedleopard]

Headcanon: Starlo does know some Japanese from being friends with Ceroba and hanging around her/being taught by her. He's definitely not as good as Ceroba is at it (and even Ceroba's Japanese isn't all that spectacular because monsterkind being trapped underground for who knows how many centuries has caused information like foreign languages to be lost to time. She's conversationally fluent). Unfortunately, Starlo understands it better than he speaks/reads it and his pronunciation leaves a lot to be desired. The best way to put it is that it sounds pretty similar to Yokohama Pidgin Japanese.

[mycological-mariner]

I love it when people ask how I know a little of something in different languages. Like yeah, I learned basic Hungarian over the course of two years just to propose to a girl only for her to break off the engagement to be with Some Guy. Yeah I tried Polish because I had beef with a guy in my class and I wanted to tell him to fuck off and call him a mouse penis personally. I learnt Danish because Norwegian was too tricky at the time and I was in a band whose whole thing was like Vikings or something and I was on vocals. Italian? I can’t remember why tbh. Romanian? It’s a very pretty Romance language and a book I wanted to read wasn’t translated yet. Also, I wanted to ask someone out.

[grimm-the-tiger]

I'm learning Dutch right now, and I keep getting thrown off by one incredibly specific thing. Dutch has two words for "The", "Het" and "De", and the usage for them seems kind of arbitrary tbh, but that's besides the point. The Dutch word for "Child" is "Kind". So if you wanted to say "The Child" in Dutch, that would be "Het Kind".

The problem is that I know Hawaiian Pidgin, which depending on who you ask is either a creole language or just an extremely divergent English accent. In Pidgin, pretty much every noun can be replaced with the phrase "Da Kine", which is more or less used as "That thing that you and I both know but I can't remember/can't be bothered to remember the proper name of right now."

So instead of "Het Kind", I keep accidentally saying "De Kine" because I keep mixing up my languages and getting both of them wrong in the process.

[littlemizzlinguistics]

My dad: so, how’s the French going?

Me, holding up an avocado: so, this is a lawyer

[uncanny-tranny]

The two things I love most about language are simultaneously that the human need to communicate is so strong that we will invent languages, vocabularies, and new turns of phrases at the drop of a hat (freeing our thoughts from the confines of our mind), but also that language is so naturally limiting that it won't truly encapsulate your deepest, most inner thoughts and feelings (your thoughts are yours, but at what cost). Do you understand how feral this makes me feel. "Please understand me," we tell each other, and we both will be seen but also so, so misunderstood, and it isn't our faults, not really, and we continue trying, trying, trying to be understood.

[kiawren]

One cool thing about Kiawren, they're both from somewhere with a creole/pidgin language. I would talk in Singlish around him, but he's obviously from a media where he'd speak proper English so I don't really know how he'd sound like speaking Hawaiian pidgin (and I still have a lot to learn about it). If he was real though, that's just one of many things we'd bond over.

[worm-of-sorts]

i love you québécoise franglais i love you multicultural toronto english i love you newfie english i love you multicultural london english i love you aave i love you rez english i love you jamaican patois i love you you beautiful languages and dialects that aren’t taken seriously because they’re just seen as "bad english"

[sanctus-ingenium]

are you irish? just wondering because a lot of your place names sound like they're as gaeilge and you draw a lot of púca :)

ya