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Ceci est un linguistic hexmap. Connections are in yellow, language barriers (heh) are in red.
I made it by running a picture of shiny fabric thru a crystallize filter, dropping a hexmap on it, and working outwards from my first handful of ideas (tonal bird latin/atonal chinese/nahuatl c++)
There are roughly 7000 languages spoken worldwide irl-- only 69 more of these and I'll finally have a fleshed out setting.
How to Use it
- decide how much vocabulary overlap there is between any two characters
- (I'm particularly proud of the word categories approach to shared vocabulary above, like "logistics" and "emotion". If I were smarter I'd just post a d100 list of those)
- maybe local (cheap) translators only bridge the yellow connections, and all other translation services are rare and expensive.
- maybe learning new languages takes more time based on the distance between them on the map?
- as a scaffold for a linguistic archaeology game, where the goal is to reassemble this map for college credit
- as a worldbuilding prompt, i guess
okay, but why tho?
If you aren't a dedicated conlanger, languages (in ttrpgs) have two gameable components:
- 1-3 vocab words
- relative positioning to adjacent languages
The first is immersive: say fasoy to a bartender for a hard drink, say maigen to an mermaid to make a friend. It also gives you (pl.) a sound library to riff on. (Does this language sound like GWAGWAGWA or skisisisis?)
The second is a measure of immediate interpretability. Can you communicate with these goblins if you don't speak goblin? If you only speak American English, how well can you get by in Italy? In Japan?
Consider this an incomplete experiment in maximalist language gaming. The important part is it was fun to make, and it looks pretty.
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