The fantasy trope that everyone of a given species shares the same language always seemed a bit funny to me.
Co-author credit on this comic to my daughter, who came up with the concept. (She makes a lot of comics about dragons, but she’s too young to share them publicly.)
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As much as people think having “Common” as a language is weird, it literally has historical roots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
People have been using a Common language for millenia. Today, the global lingua franca is obviously English. For about 1500 years, the lingua franca of medieval Europe was Latin. And for a while in the Mediterranean it was Sabir, where Lingua Franca the term came from, which was a weird simplified Mediterranean mix of languages (no verb conjugation, etc).
Other areas with multiple languages have had their own Lingua Francas. It’s a common thing to happen if you have big areas with multiple languages and lots of trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lingua_francas
So it’s really not weird to have a Common tongue in games. It came from LotR which came from history since Tolkien was a huge language nerd and wrote a world for his language to exist.
The de facto lingua franca is English, except things like “de facto” or “lingua franca”.
the reason why everybody is compatible with english is because english is compatible with everything.