One thing I’ve never understood is even though the people living Beyond the Wall have been sequestered from the rest of Westeros for the past eight thousands years, somehow the Common Tongue is still widely spoken by many of its inhabitants. Not only that but there’s also no discrepancy from their vernacular compared to the rest of the continent. In fact quite a few Wildlings we’ve encountered such as Ygritte, Mance and Tormund are able to speak the Common Tongue better than many smallfolk and Mountain Clans in the Vale who seem to speak a completely different dialect from their unsophisticated lingo and gibberish.
Now I get that for Jon’s story to work he has to be able to communicate with the Wildlings, hence we have this Aliens speak English trope going on in his arc. But realistically this shouldn’t be possible. I mean it only took a few centuries for Latin to evolve into completely new languages of many distinct variations such as French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese etc, and the people who spoke these languages were still more or less in contact with one another after Rome fell. Yet even after eight thousands years of being cut off from the rest of civilization without much interaction with the people south of their region, many Wildlings can still speak the Common Tongue unaltered and indistinct from their southern neighbors.
Do you think there is an explanation for this?
This is a case where narrative convenience seems to have trumped coherent worldbuilding, but I say seems because I’m not clear on why or how necessary it was. GRRM’s got no problem inventing multiple languages in Essos, although he does cheat a bit with how Valyrian dialects are mostly mutually coherent, after all.
(However, if I was to give a No Prize, I’d say that because the wildlings steal women all the time from the North, they’re constantly importing women who teach the Common Tongue to their kids.)
So how hard would it have been to decide that, because the North held off the Andal invasion, the Old Tongue survived North of the Wall, although after thousands of years where Andal was an incredibly useful linga franca for trade and diplomacy with the rest of the continent, and three hundred years of Targaryen unification, they’ve gradually merged the Old Tongue and the Common Tongue into a creole like Scots, but where the nobility learn to speak proper Old Tongue (to keep up their traditions) and a more Received Pronunciation Common Tongue as well? That way, Jon could speak easily with the Wildlings because he can speak their language, whereas your average Night’s Watchman might not speak their language at all if they’re southron (hence adding to the Othering going on), or only haltingly in a limited pidgen if they’re a Northerner.
Likewise, why isn’t the Common Tongue in Dorne absolutely peppered with Rhoynish loan words and grammatical constructions, as well as having a distinctive accent? Why don’t the residents of the big cities use a bit of Valyrian loan-words which are handy in commerce, which the rural folk find a bit too foreign for their liking?
I don’t remember much of the wildling history but Mance wasn’t born North of the Wall. He was a “southerner”, as the wildlings would call it, and a man of the Night’s Watch before he fled North.
So his speaking of the common tongue is understandable.
Mance was born north of the Wall, but not raised north of the Wall. He was taken as a child by the Night’s Watch when a wildling raider band was put to the sword, and raised to adulthood at the Shadow Tower.
So Mance makes sense. Ygritte and Tormund, less so.
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