[It Hurt Itself In Its Confusion!] - Blog Posts

I would love to get into language stuff for the ✨️bearimba pokeverse✨️ but the more I look into it the more I confuse myself?? Like. It feels like I've opened a huge can of worms here. Sure, I could be overthinking it, but if I didn't overthink things, then this blog literally wouldn't exist, so.

Quick warning for a long, probably quite boring, and highly speculative rant:

To start out with, I would love for each region to have its own language, more or less---regions that are geographically close are likely to have similar languages possibly due to a common ancestor (like how Spanish and Italian are both Romantic languages that came from Vulgar Latin), but otherwise, each language would be distinct. But then there's the matter of how exactly these languages evolved to be distinct from one another, or even more confoundingly, how these languages had a shared ancestor in the first place. Take Kalos and Paldea, for example: both are based off of Romantic-speaking countries. France and Spain, respectively. In the ✨️bearimba pokeverse ✨️, these regions are nowhere near each other, but somehow, they speak similar languages (assuming the pokeverse languages are like or the same as their real-life equivalents). How does that work exactly?? The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that at one point in time, people from one of these regions emigrated away to go live in the other region. but. if you think about it, the people that moved away would've had to leave long enough ago that the region would have time to develop from nothing into the state it is in modern times. Obviously that's going to take quite a long time---take the USA for example, which from the point of its conception as a collection of colonies (and I am specifically talking about America as it was founded by Europeans and not the collection of Native American cultures) has been around for over 200 years, and American English has changed drastically during that time. Yes, it hasn't quite evolved into a new language, but it is different enough to be distinguished from British English. Keep in mind that 200 years is (to my knowledge) a remarkably short time for a country to be considered developed, not to mention that England and its colonies had constant communication that kept the languages from deviating too far. My point is, two countries that are geographically separated for multiple centuries without regular consistant contact are likely to develop very different languages, but since Kalos and Paldea are based off of countries with similar languages, this doesn't really sit right with me. Theoretically, I could just place them closer together physically, but that would make travel between them much more feasible which would result in more cultural similarities than are present in the games, so then I'd probably have to do an overhaul of both regions' cultures, and I'd like to keep them as unique as possible. Do you see my problem here????

That's not even to mention my issue with multilinguisim. If every single region has their own language, then there has to be some sort of lingua franca so that everyone can actually communicate. However! Believe it or not, this comes with its own set of issues! The first of which being, how did this lingua franca come into existence? The most obvious answer is that it's a pidgin or creole language, but a language made of bits and pieces from 9+ other languages is going to get complicated real quick. The only other origin for a lingua franca I've come across so far is colonial languages. and, uh. that is just not an option I'm going to pick. so.

Besides the origin of this lingua franca, there's also the matter of how it spreads. Lingua francas are created and used to share information between linguistically separated parties, typically during business or academic exchanges. But not everyone is going to talk to people from other regions in that type of circumstance! Someone might specifically learn the lingua franca so that they can communicate while traveling to other regions, but that won't necessarily make it widely user, and this supposed to be a universal language. My solution: have it be taught in schools! It's like how English is taught in many Asian countries in order to enable participation in international circles. However, it's entirely possible that not every school will have the funding (how pokemon schools even get funding is its own separate thing that I have yet to even consider) to teach the lingua franca. There's other ways to learn, of course, like being taught by family/friends or even teaching yourself, but those methods aren't necessarily standardized. Then again, neither is getting taught at school---it's like learning textbook Spanish in class then traveling to Spain and realizing that you're woefully unprepared. Whatever method is used, it's best to start learning at an young age, as the earlier you start, the easier it is to pick up a new language. Again though, that's not going to be accessible to everyone, so it's entirely possible that some people will just be limited to one language unless they take it upon themselves to learn.

Long story short, linguistics is hard. At least to me. And everything I've mentioned is mostly about figuring things out on a practical level---there's still more cultural stuff to consider like code-switching, global/regional slang, and other things that I haven't even thought of. I'm not really linguistics enthusiast, nor am I especially ready and raring to do deep research at the moment, but looking into some of this stuff really has been quite interesting! Anyways, I don't really have a good way to end all this, so I guess if you actually read all this, congrats? And thank you? And that either way, I hope you have a good day? Yep.