@Jaredan Inconsistencies in language

Teslablade·4/29/2016, 3:35:42 PM·1 votes·732 views

I love 'The Bird and Branch' much as anyone else, and I'm really excited for the new champion, but there's a gaping hole in the teaser that really should be addressed: how does a young girl from a remote desert waste understand and communicate with a)Noxians and b)Yasuo, who grew up in a secluded monestary on the other side of the world? This is indicative of a larger problem. As of right now, a lot of Runeterra's cultures have not been fleshed out and are somewhat homogeneous, with the most important factor being language. I'm not asking for a ConLang, but just an explantion of Runeterra's languages.

3 Comments

Hethalean4/29/2016, 3:38:25 PM1 votes

Well, they are probably leaving some of it up to the reader's imagination. Like for instance, a lot of the world is bilingual. I see a few answers here:

There is one universal language.
She's picked languages up along the way.
Yasuo is multilingual.

That being said. I think that it'd be interesting to hear more about Runeterra languages.

MisterHealYoGirl4/29/2016, 4:16:26 PM1 votes

Ionia has some ancient classical tongues (It's what Yasuo's 'Hasagi' and Karma's 'Sae Eleisa Tera Vi' are), but they speak a common tongue with the rest of Runeterra. Both Noxus and Demacia have greek-derived names (Naxos and Drymalia). This may indicate that they share a common history, and a common language with it. Bandle City's name is Irish in origin, and Shurima is obviously an off-brand Egypt.

In general, the amount of trade and interaction that the nations of Runeterra engage in, as well as the frequent wars and conquests, would indicate that they have developed a 'lingua franca'; some common tongue that they all speak. This is especially likely given the level of globalization indicated by the existence of the League.

Trylobyte4/29/2016, 4:20:07 PM1 votes

The Runeterran world is a bit smaller than Earth, so it's likely that either most people are multilingual or there's a common language most of them speak. Given that Yasuo is able to give competent directions from Ionia to Shurima (which goes through at least two other nations by the sound of it) he's very well-educated, so it wouldn't surprise me if he speaks Shuriman. As for Taliyah, if she was tooling around Noxus for a bit then she obviously had to know enough of their language to understand them. Mages in general also have a tendency to know a lot of languages, so it's possible she'd speak Ionian as well, assuming they are different languages at all.

I'd think, though, that the presence of the merchants and the discussion they had suggest that there's a common language between most of Runeterra, since Taliyah and Yasuo both understand them fine. The slang terms and specific words may be different from place to place (regional dialects) but the language is generally the same.