Westeros's Linguistic differences

[Willam Stark]

13 hours ago, BlackLightning said:

I don't know about a dozen languages per kingdom.

France, which is approximately the same size as the Stormlands, had a dozen languages (even more) before the end of the 19th century when French supplanted the other languages. This is the least you would find in a realistic Westeros for each kingdom, which would bring the number of different languages to over a hundred in total. Only the Iron Islands could have a single language since they are small and isolated from the continent, it would be an Andal dialect with a huge admixture of their original language.

I agree with you for the North, given its history and culture it would make more sense for the Northern lords to speak in their Old Tongue dialect in everyday life and switch to Common Tongue when they interact with foreigners. Brides from the South such as Catelyn or Lynesse Hightower would learn the local dialect to interact with their servants just like Dany did.

[WhatAnArtist!]

1 minute ago, Willam Stark said:

France, which is approximately the same size as the Stormlands, had a dozen languages (even more) before the end of the 19th century when French supplanted the other languages

I don't mean to be pedantic, but it's dialects that you're thinking of, not languages per se. Breton was one of the only actually distinct languages; almost all of the others were different dialects of French, all offshoots of the Latin language.

[Willam Stark]

9 minutes ago, WhatAnArtist! said:

I don't mean to be pedantic, but it's dialects that you're thinking of, not languages per se. Breton was one of the only actually distinct languages; almost all of the others were different dialects of French, all offshoots of the Latin language.

They had the same roots but weren't all mutually intelligible, specially the dialects of Southern France for french speakers.

I'm a French myself, I know what I'm talking about (the French languages of course).

[Vaolor]

Another thing that should be noted is that the Old Tongue itself would also change from its origin when it appeared in Westeros.

If anyone has heard of Proto-Indo-European(PIE) it would be a lot like that. PIE is a reconstructed language from looking at the languages of europe and northern india and languages in between and they all have commonalities showing that all descend from a single common language that existed before writing.

This would mean that the Old Tongue would not have been an unchanging monolith but would have also diverged when groups who spoke it would go and settle different areas and their language would diverge.

The Old Tongue would realistically have diverged so much that the First Men would have spoken languages as different from each other as the modern languages which all descend from PIE such as French, German, Albanian, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, English, Serbian, Spanish, Sanskrit, Farsi, Hindi, Greek, and Kurdish.

To put that into perspective if the Old Tongue was still spoken as it was when the First Men arrived at Westeros it would be like if today everyone in Europe, from the mediterranean all the way up to the north sea and as far east as India still spoke a single language that hadn't changed in thousands of years.

[Willam Stark]

16 hours ago, Vaolor said:

If anyone has heard of Proto-Indo-European(PIE) it would be a lot like that. PIE is a reconstructed language from looking at the languages of europe and northern india and languages in between and they all have commonalities showing that all descend from a single common language that existed before writing.

Now that you mention it, given the time span between the Coming of Andals, the beginning of the saga and the fact that the Common Tongue is actually modern English, the Early Andals would have spoken this language but with a different name of course (PIE). Thus this PIE would have given birth to the modern languages we have in our world nowadays, or a few dozen of Germanic languages.