I've looked at books. I've looked and movies and TV shows. I've skirted around looking at audiobooks.
But what about games? Table-Top Role Playing Games (D&D, Pathfinder, GURPS, etc.) have a rather unique relationship to their audience--the audience is an integral participant in the creation of the story that they are experiencing! Which makes any linguistic issues considerably more immediate and immersive than they can be in any other medium. They are also uniquely difficult to study, as the stories are (excepting streamed and recorded gaming sessions) ephemeral.
At LTUE 2023, I had the realization that this was a medium worth studying, and that the only way to really do it would be to talk to game masters and players about their experiences, if they have had any experiences with integrating multiple languages into a game. So, if you're a player or GM and have something to say about this, contact me!
In the meantime, I've got my own experiences to reflect on, and a few preliminary conversations. A lot of gaming settings include multiple languages in the background (and in fact, I am currently under contract with a game publisher to create naming languages for a new RPG campaign setting), but game systems almost always provide some mechanism for getting around any real language barriers--universal translators, or Comprehend Languages spells, etc., and most DMs won't include linguistic content as more than a brief puzzle or background color. And there are perfectly understandable reasons for that--aside from issues that pertain to all fictional media, telling your players that they can't understand what someone else is saying can feel a lot like saying "You can't play my game." And to quote Bob Defendi, "If you tell your players 'you can't play my game', they'll just leave."
But I've been in games where language barriers were used to good effect, without spells or technology to eliminate them. This was done in two ways: one which relied on the fact that I myself am bilingual, and one which did not.
In the first instance, our GM mapped in-game languages onto the real-world languages spoken by various members of our group. Thus, we could map our real-world linguistic diversity into the game--if I didn't want everyone in the party who spoke Common to understand something, I could speak Russian rather than English to represent that my character was speaking a particular in-world language, and only the other players (and by extension, their characters) who also spoke Russian would understand. So, do you ever have players who keep secrets from each other? I know my groups do! And exploiting natural language barriers is an easy way to manage that.
In the second instance, we all just kept track of which languages our characters spoke in-world, and the GM avoided Not Letting Us Play The Game by simply ensuring that every NPC could be understood by some member of the party--but, it was then up to that member of the party whether or not to inform everyone else, and how accurately to "translate"! Thus, the GM could direct information to particular characters, with in-world justification. Real-world communication in this case just relied on passing notes to keep secrets.
Neither of these approaches involve literal representation of in-world languages. They can be completely fictional, with no concrete form. So, making decent role-playing use of conlangs is still unsolved, from my perspective, although I know there are people who have done it! But, my own experiences do show that it is possible to integrate linguistic representation into a game in a way that involves the characters and still keeps things fun.
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