About the “Common Tongue”: With his otherwise incredible attention to detail and realism in all aspects, doesn’t seem like a pretty typically anglo-saxon AND presentist trope to have the Westerosi language be A) called the “common” tongue and B) somehow happen to be spoken fluently by so many all the way to Qarth? Why no mention of Qartheen or Asshaii languages (or accents)?

Yes and no.

GRRM has said in interviews that he had the vast majority of characters be fluent in the “Common Tongue” because A. it’s easier if all of the characters can communicate with one another, and B. he’s not an Oxford don linguist who can come up with new languages at the drop of a hat. So I think it’s more just for convenience’s sake than anything else.

On the other hand…I think you’re also painting with too broad a brush. Planetos is a place with many languages – Valyrian and not the Common Tongue is the lingua france of Essos, and even then it’s already breaking down into separate dialects on the way to separate languages in the various Free Cities and Slaver’s Bay, there’s the Slaver’s Bay dialect with its loan words that are all that remain of Ghiscari, and so on.

So to take Qarth as an example, when Dany is greeted by the three:

The pale man with the blue lips replied in guttural Dothraki, “I am Pyat Pree, the great warlock.”

The bald man with the jewels in his nose answered in the Valyrian of the Free Cities, “I am Xaro Xhoan Daxos of the Thirteen, a merchant prince of Qarth.”

The woman in the lacquered wooden mask said in the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms, “I am Quaithe of the Shadow. We come seeking dragons.” (Dany I, ACOK)

Two out of three don’t speak to her in the Common Tongue. Pyat Pree takes a look at a small khalasar and speak to them in Dothraki, the merchant speaks to them in Valyrian because that’s what traders speak in, and the only one who uses the Common Tongue is a prophetess and shadowbinder who can see the future and who already knows who Dany is.

As far as accents go, they definitely exist. We know that Melisandre’s speech is “rich with the accents of the east” (Davos IV, ASOS), we know that the people of the Free Cities speak Westerosi with a “lilt of the Free Cities” (Arya II, ACOK), also described as a “liquid accent.” But we also know that the different accents of Braavos, Tyrosh, Myr, Norvos, Pentos, etc. are distinct.

Simon Rumble Asks: Alphabets

Should Dorne and the North have a slightly different alphabet/linguistic system compared to the rest of Westeros due to Rhyonish/First Men influence?

If we’re going to start with the idea that all of Westeros speaks the Common Tongue as their primary language as GRRM does, then there’s a limit to how much variation there should be.

A different alphabet? That really depends. The Old Tongue of the North had a runic script but was primarily an oral tradition, so in a scenario in which the Old Tongue survives, I’d imagine it would be transliterated into Andal script. Given that the Rhoynar were a more technologically advanced and literate culture than the First Men, I would expect a Rhoynish script to survive if the Martells hadn’t banned the Rhoynish language.

A different linguistic system? Well, given that the Andals had been in Dorne for thousands of years when the Rhoynar arrived and then there was an intense period of intermarriage and cultural borrowing, I would expect the emergence of a creole language that combined lexicons and grammars from the two language, with perhaps the elite learning “proper” Andal or Rhoynar or both (depending on the House’s heritage or their desire for political advancement at Sunspear). Given that the North avoided Andal invasion altogether, I would expect bilingualism to be the more likely scenario, with Andal becoming the language of trade and diplomacy, spoken by merchants, sailors, the nobility, and more common in the White Harbor area due to the transplantation of the Manderlys, but as a secondary language, with the Old Tongue as the primary language and the only language of the vast majority of the population in the interior.

Steven Xue Asks: How can the Wildlings still be speaking the Common Tongue?

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 Neck, 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?