How New Languages are Born

As I referenced here in this post back last August, there's a book out there called The Past is a Foreign Country that's actually on my To Be Read list --and that sucker is pretty huge, so it'll take a while to read-- that I'm looking forward to digging into.

I was thinking about that "foreign Language" part today when I was perusing some gamer blogs I don't frequent that much. 

I'm quite familiar with the "language" of Classic WoW --the slang behind the game-- and to a lesser extent that of several other MMOs, but it was when I perused those sites/blogs that primarily focused on Retail WoW did I detect the so-called "lingual shift" that make the two groups entirely separate entities. 

I was reminded of something a high school teacher once mentioned in class about the Romance languages: all of those languages derived from Latin* were once simply local dialects of Latin that grew apart over the centuries. 

Despite the global reach of mass communication these days, there are times when you talk to someone from another English speaking country and you can't really follow what they're saying. There was a time this past Spring when I happened to have the television on a Saturday morning and there was a Scottish Premier League match on**, and while I was able to follow the play-by-play announcer, the color commentator... Well, at one point I turned to my wife and said "I have absolutely no idea what the hell he's saying."

It wasn't just the accent, since some Scottish accents are really thick --as my son discovered when he visited Edinburgh while he spent six months studying abroad at Lancaster University in England***-- but the slang he was using made absolutely no sense to me. 

Or, as I've discovered courtesy of an Aussie friend --met via WoW Classic, naturally-- that there's an entire subculture completely foreign to other English speaking countries merely using the word 'cunt' in Australia.

After a certain point dialects become separate languages. While that might be harder in this day and age, it won't stop happening. And even within online communities, the siloing effect of social media makes it easier for groups to self-isolate, and by that isolation they develop their own terminology/slang that gradually becomes a dialect all its own.

***

Circling back to gaming, when I read Retail WoW blogs that discuss the nuts and bolts of the game, it makes absolutely no sense to me.

Kind of like this. Thanks, Cap.
From Pinterest.

Some of it is not having played Retail WoW in a decade (and as far as PvE content goes, longer than that), and systems have grown and changed. Some it is also the slang surrounding the systems having mutated to the point where what you thought you knew in 2012 is completely out of step with 2024. 

When you need a translation guide for returning players, you know that lingual shifts have occurred. 

***

One thing I've noticed when I login to Season of Discovery or WoW Classic Era servers and simply hang around a capital city is that the questions people ask are answered more with, well, normal English rather than shorthand. That is less the case in Wrath Classic, and the few times I've ever logged into Retail the past year I've seen questions answered with shorthand that I would characterize as "gobbledygook"****. Admittedly, the RP community on the Season of Discovery server I'm on might have an impact there, but I've seen it on my "normal" Era server as well, so I think it's a tendency of people who play on these Era-type of servers to answer questions in plain English.*****

Of course, that doesn't stop the flame wars concerning whether the dungeon acronym "DM" means Dire Maul or Deadmines, but that's been going on in WoW since, well, forever. 

Kind of ironic that the one thing that still brings the various versions of WoW together is an argument over what to call The Deadmines.

All about that context.
From Know Your Meme.

Still, in the end, I do wonder whether the two communities have grown so far apart that they've become Balkanized, and that the slang/dialects used within the two communities is just a symptom of the overall problem.

*Thereby bursting the bubble of hormone-addled high school boys that these languages were the key to "romance".

**It was the March 5, 2023 match between St. Mirren and Celtic. Once the St. Mirren player Charles Dunne got a red card in the 39th minute... Boy, did Celtic kick St. Mirren's ass.

***He and a friend had gotten on a train heading north to Edinburgh and some announcements were read over an intercom by a Scot with an accent so thick that my son turned to his friend and gave the universal "I have absolutely no idea what was just said" shrug. There was also another time when he'd gotten on a train in Wales, where the announcements are made in both Welsh and English, and this particular time the announcer forgot to speak in English. "Well," my son quipped, "I guess we're going to find out if we're on the right train really soon."

****When they didn't get a response saying "google it" or "go to Wowhead", that is.

*****I might make a toon on a PvP server just to check. I certainly don't need the stress of being on PvP servers in general, not after my experience on Stormscale-US back in the day.