This post is a response to Xaosseed's post Your great-grand-elf's elvish: long lives slowing language change (RPG Blog Carnival) . I suggest reading that first in its entirety, before I dig into it. My goal here is to have a deeper discussion, not just to rain Xaosseed's linguistic parade. This lede hooked me: The RPG Blog Carnival prompt from Beneath Foreign Planets of WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics sparked some other thoughts for me - on the stability of language when there are very long-lived organisms around. Xaosseed shared the hypothesis of the post: The core thought here is that you can find thousand year old elves, dragons and giants around - presumably still speaking the same language with the same accent as when they learned their languages in their your - so accents and languages would change much more slowly in such settings than in our own world. Xaosseed then set up the setting's premise with respect to linguistic stability, whi