Considerations of Xaosseed's Long Lives Slowing Language Change

 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, which can be summarized as:

The elves contorolled the main continent for about four thousand years before withdrawing about one thousand years ago. Many generations of races to have lived and died beside the children of the elves who departed a millenium ago.

Elven became the lingua franca for the former Elvish territories and remained recognisably similar because they were living with the elves and their long-lived descendents who spoke that language and put a brake on its linguistic drift. 

I can pretty much buy this.  Barring migration, children tend to have the same accents as their parents.  People do change their own accents and speech patterns over their lives, but I'll take it as a given that elves don't.

Where I find myself getting dubious is here:

This stabilising influence of very long lived creatures would also apply for giant and draconic and one would assume acting on goliath and dragonborn populations too. The big question is whether these long-lived creatures would also stabilise other langages [sic] for other populations? This would be a question of contact - if elves and dwarves are in frequent contact with shorter-lived humans or goblinoids *and* speak with them in their own tongues, it could happen. If contact is less frequent then you would end up with divergence like modern Swiss-German sounding like Ye Olde German to the Austrians and Germans - understandable but not quite the same.

In theory, I agree that contact with elven language would be fairly stable with local populations, but in practice, I look to places like London, England, the seat of the King's English (or Estuary English, or Received Pronounciation, as time goes by), which is also associated with the Cockney dialect.  I suppose at best that those with a stake in maintaining good relations with the Elven empire would certainly speak it properly to their faces, and that, as French did with the Normans, Elven terms would become loan words in the local languages, but that there would also likely be some sort of pidgin Elven for use by those less-educated, but working for their Elven betters.

I suspect the situation would be similar, but worse for other languages, such as Draconic or Goliath tongues, since it sounds like they are less dominant influences than that of the Elves.

Let us now consider what could be done to make this situation more plausible.  To my mind, it would have to be something that makes the language more pervasive within the entire culture it is involved in.  The closest real world examples we have are the wholesale export of American culture through movies and music, and even further through the computers and the Internet. 

While these things do not directly impact the lives of every person on Earth, they have certainly influenced those who have influenced 95%+ of the world in the last twenty years.  Certainly by the 1970s, common people in Soviet dominated Europe--substantially cut off from the rest of the world--were very aware of American culture, even if they didn't fully understand it.  The discussions of the Russian crew of the submarine Red October in the movie of the same name, for instance, demonstrate this perception in American culture of the reality of Soviet culture, and that's before computers and the Internet.

In the fall of Soviet Europe, and with the expansion of computers and the Internet as envoys of American culture in general, and the English language in particular, the pervasiveness of English has exploded.  Consider that for the vast majority of the world, the most popular language to learn in most of the world is English. The example doesn't go as far as the premise Xaosseed presented, in that there is not one iconic English as there seems to be of Elven, or at least the Elven empire in that world.  Still, it makes a certain point.  While there is contention about which version (American Standard English vs. Standard British English), there is significant enough commonality between them that I don't think it's worth digging further here for the purposes of this article.

With that established, what could be used in Xaosseed's setting beyond long-lived elves to perpetuate their language in places that had once been their territories and are still heavily influenced by Elven culture?  What are potential fantasy equivalents to movies, music, computers, and the Internet?

1. Troupes of actors and musicians might have studied Elvish works such as operas, plays, and epics, and perform them to the more cultured people of the former Elven territories.
2. Elven beliefs might be a significant part of the local religions, either having been incorporated into older religions, or as part of new cults which see elves as more divine beings than the shorter-lived races, and thus closer to the gods, and so worthy of emulation.  These religions could propagate through the population, conveying and incorporating Elven culture in that of the shorter-lived races.
   
3. Music players: Items which include a selection of songs and lyrics.  They'd probably be made of relatively easy magic, to allow for a significant number of them to be made.  They could consist of a player, probably made of wood given their source, and song collections, as rods, crystals, or stones inserted into the player.  This would be a very clear parallel of a CD player with this implementation, but with more thought, I'm sure other less blatant analogs could be thought of.
4. Picture and moving picture story players: an obvious extension to music players, displaying images above a surface.
5. Basic tutors: An extension of the previous item, these items interactively teach a selection of subjects, and may have an expansion of subjects available. Some of these may serve as information desks in busy places.  Advanced tutors are telepathic rather than using audible and visible glamors, and while they don't provide the same social cachet to broad non-Elven society, those in the know are definitely aware of these items, which are worn as oversized amulets or across the chest like a satchel, and tend to provide more specialized knowledge on topics which the local language doesn't yet have a significant vocabulary for.  There might even be advanced tutors that can be used while one sleeps, to maximize the pace of one's learning.
   
6. Messenger animals: bred and enhanced to intrinsically speak and understand Elvish, but not any other language, these creatures are smart enough to be able to delivery messages to verbally specified people at specified locations, and take responses back to their masters.  Other animals might similarly be bred to act as nannies or caregivers for young children, also speaking in Elven, and thus teaching the language to young children.
   
7. More powerful magical items which can only be activated in Elvish incentivize those with aspirations to access these items to learn the language properly, especially since they are intentionally unforgiving about mispronunciation.
   
8. Story player devices have conveyed tropes about Elvish ceremonies which popular and elite society both imitate, including the proper use of Elvish language.  Parallels to this exist in historic English noble society using French culture and language in a similar way.
   
9. The Elven empire provides limited scholarship and cultural exchanges, of course limited to those who are most fluent in Elvish, further encouraging use of proper Elvish.
10. Elves weighs Elven fluency as a significant factor in trade with and employment of non-elves, and they pay quite well, in part to earn loyalty of those they deal with.
11. Elves who particularly don't want to have to deal with teaching Elvish over and over again might come up with solutions such as knowledge of Elvish delivered in food, or modifying the essence of shorter-lived races to include that knowledge at an unconscious level, so that they don't even need to learn it, in the same way they might do with lesser beasts.
12. Elves might have scrolls or potions of "speak Elvish", or even a spell of "speak Elvish"that can be learned by magic users and cast on groups.  Parallels for other languages haven't yet been developed--or maybe they have, but nobody outside of those affected by these variant spells understands the language those spells now evoke, and so they have substantially less value.  Those conscious of status symbols might similarly require their servants to interact in Elvish instead of the local language as well.
    
13. If the decline of the Elvish empire was in part due to significant numbers of deaths in their population, it could be that Elvish souls are being reincarnated in the bodies of shorter-lived races, and remember some of the culture of their previous lives.  This obviously wouldn't work with many interpretations of elves, including elves of Tolkien's Middle-Earth, but could work for other kinds of elves, such as the Minbari of Babylon 5.
    

Thank you, Xaosseed, for your original thought-provoking post, for encouraging a response, and for your patience while I dealt with real-life complications while considering it.

Please leave a comment below if you have thoughts on improving any of the ideas listed here, have additional ideas, or have feedback on the whole concept.