Language in Golarion

A woman from Tian-Xia.

A discussion with a friend made me consider the reality of language in a realistic high fantasy world. Because the Golarion that my Lest Dispelled GURPS campaign will be portrayed as realistically as possible, the nature of language has to be addressed.

No Common Tongue

Refer to the contents of this post. The Common language has been removed and localized to a region by which the language originates.

Literacy

In the GURPS system, most characters are assumed to be able to read and write a native language. However, because of the technology level that Golarion is intending to capture (TL 3), and because most of the peasantry would not need to know how to write, it is also being established that all characters and templates will start with Semi-Literacy (B24). This is effectively a disadvantage worth -2 points that equates to a Native comprehension of a language as a Spoken language, but a Broken comprehension of writing. The higher an individual’s status, and depending on their occupation, a character could do away with this disadvantage and instead possess Native comprehension in both.

Language Defaults

Since language has suddenly become a great deal more important with the changes outlined above, and because language and culture have been divorced from most base race templates, the following is a thorough list of languages in the world of Golarion. The only languages excluded are those more esoteric ones found in the Darklands. If ever encountered, appropriate Paizo supplements should be referred to. It is alluded to by Paizo that there may more languages than this, but this is a mostly complete enumeration of all languages sampled in their supplements.

This listing includes who typically speaks them as well as defaulting languages ¹. This is inspired by the article found in Pyramid #3/16: Historical Exploration called “Languages, Culture, and the Common Tongue.” The idea here is that because many of the languages in Golarion, like in modern day Earth, are derivatives or tied to other languages in some manner, making the transition from a given language to another sometimes easier than simply learning an entirely new language.

For the table below, use the following key. Under Forms, a W signifies that the language has a written form, an S signifies it has a spoken form, and D signifies the language is dead. Under Defaults, a language -2 implies that the two languages are distantly related and defaults to the other at Broken. A language -1 signifies the two are closely related and therefore defaults to the other at Accented. If a parenthesis follows a language with an S or W, it implies that only the spoken or written forms of the language are related, respectively.