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imperial culture

Good point

Working in a NATO environment is reminiscent of this sort of issue. A couple of different US accents, more different Brit accents, Canadians & Kiwis & Aussies, Germans & Austrians, Poles and Czechs & Slovaks, Romanians, Italians, Dutch & Danes Norwegians and the Baltic states, the Spanish and Portuguese. It gets most interesting in meetings when all the thick accents are most pronounced, when they all use the most commonly spoken language - English. Given how thick some of the accents are it's possible to imagine they're divergent dialects of Anglic.

been their, done that. form my experience, its not so much the accents that are the issue, its dialect and slang terminology that throw people, especially those who speak it as a second tongue and have learnt the classroom "formal" English but have little real experience of how native speakers actually talk.

or even just the little slang terms ("can I bum a fag off ya?" Is a fairly innocent question in England, but one that never ceases to startle Americans. for the record, its "can a mooch a cigarette form you?")
 
been their, done that. form my experience, its not so much the accents that are the issue, its dialect and slang terminology that throw people, especially those who speak it as a second tongue and have learnt the classroom "formal" English but have little real experience of how native speakers actually talk.

or even just the little slang terms ("can I bum a fag off ya?" Is a fairly innocent question in England, but one that never ceases to startle Americans. for the record, its "can a mooch a cigarette form you?")

You put someone with a Cajun accent from northeastern Louisiana on the radio and you better have another Cajun on the other end, otherwise, you are out of luck understanding him. Just consider the regional accents in the US and all of the varieties of regional slang and terms, and it approaches dialect level. I suspect that someone from one of the low-population planets in the Spinward Marches would not understand someone who had lived all of their life on Capitol.
 
reminds me of when hannibal was trying to move his troops to winter quarters, and was asking a local man where a certain city was. hannibal was no good at latin, but everyone was afraid to tell him, so the guide misunderstood the city name hannibal said and led him to the wrong place. it played a role in the outcome of his war with rome.

it would be great if you could describe one of these meetings, how misunderstandings are detected and dealt with.

..long pause before the answer...

They generally involved someone saying their piece and, if it was particularly unintelligible and another person asked for clarification, there'd normally be one or two who could offer a better way to pronounce it. Sometimes it was another person from the same country who spoke English a little clearer and they'd clarify things in their own tongue before offering the English version. The east Europeaners were often tricky, but sometimes a Scotsman or a southerner would utter something to blank looks all around. Slang wasn't so much of a problem it seemed when everyone was speaking meetingese English, it was afterwards when they relaxed that those would come more to the fore.
 
IMTU the Imperium's uniformed services and ministries impose and, if necessary, teach a "received pronunciation" version of Ganglic. The megacorps and other large organizations do much the same. If' you're a Traveller, you can speak Ganglic with an accent many others will find intelligible. You may still speak with a local, planetary, or regional accent privately or while among friends and family, but you know how to speak "correctly".

IMTU and much like with some current Chinese dialects, there are Ganglic dialects which are mutually unintelligible but whose speakers can read the same Ganglic text.

IMTU and much like with Spanish spoken in Spain versus Spanish spoken in Central and South America, there are marked vocabulary differences between Ganglic dialects.

Finally, during my time in the Haze Grey Canoe Club, I saw some individuals assigned to regular training using sound powered phones because their "native" English accents meant they weren't understood by others using that internal communication system.
 
I've seen the BBC put subtitles on interviews with northerners, Scots, Welsh and Irish because the shandy drinking southerners can not understand the accents yet we have to put up with presenters who can not pronounce 'll' correctly - wall becomes wawl or even waw, ball becomes bawl or baw - we don't get subtitles for their regional accent...
 
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I've seen the BBC put subtitles on interviews with northerners, Scots, Welsh and Irish because the shandy drinking southerners can not understand the accents yet we have to put up with presenters who can not pronounce 'll' correctly - wall becomes wawl or even waw, ball becomes bawl or baw - we don't get subtitles for their regional accent...

i'll just leave this here


link is to a youtube clip of a English sketch show.
 
I've seen the BBC put subtitles on interviews with northerners, Scots, Welsh and Irish because the shandy drinking southerners can not understand the accents yet we have to put up with presenters who can not pronounce 'll' correctly - wall becomes wawl or even waw, ball becomes bawl or baw - we don't get subtitles for their regional accent...
Timeless classics of British TV such as Geordie Shore ...
 
In the Imperium military it's probably a requirement that you can understand and clearly communicate, if not fluently, in whatever form the official language of the Imperium takes.

Civil servants are likely to need to be fluent, having passed some rigourous entrance exams amongst stiff competition.
 
In the Imperium military it's probably a requirement that you can understand and clearly communicate, if not fluently, in whatever form the official language of the Imperium takes.

Civil servants are likely to need to be fluent, having passed some rigourous entrance exams amongst stiff competition.


Merchants would want fluency as well.
 
Imo, nobility would make an effort to speak the dialect of their social betters. The planetary nobles would make an effort to speak their betters at the subsector duke's court. It would be like learning a second language, probably, like the working class woman learning proper English in pygmalion. The radioactive rain on ganulph falls mainly on the ash plain.

Nobles of the subsector duke's court who have reason to interact with aristocrats closer to the sector metropole would take refresher courses in the metropole dialect before going there. At home, their dialect would likely be that of the people they spend the most time interacting with. If they only associate with their own social class, they'll speak a dialect close to that of the subsector metropole. If they spend their time working closely with the world's indigenous people, they'll gradually begin to sound like that because of habitually needing to make themselves understood.

Conditions encouraging dialects and linguistic drift include the expense and time of travel, and the lack of immediate interstellar media, and tech levels 7 and lower (no planetary internet).

For imperial organizations, fluency in standard galanglic is probably a requirement for voluntary enlistment.

Imo imperial forces would probably recruit, train and deploy in their local regions to reduce transportation time and cost. If scout courier air filters need to be replaced every 6 weeks, a long distance deployment of major fleet elements would leave thousands of expended air filters in its wake, serenely drifting in space. Ground forces I think would almost certainly deploy from nearby subsectors, or the sector at the farthest.
 
nobility would make an effort to speak the dialect of their social betters. The planetary nobles would make an effort to speak their betters at the subsector duke's court.

Likely, especially if the magnitude of the power imbalance is obvious.

I think the spread of court language might not outstrip the pace of pidgin/patois languages on many worlds. The court may speak The Emperor's Galanglic, but the street would sound a lot different. ESR broke my brain over this topic some months ago.
 
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Imo, nobility would make an effort to speak the dialect of their social betters. The planetary nobles would make an effort to speak their betters at the subsector duke's court. It would be like learning a second language, probably, like the working class woman learning proper English in pygmalion. The radioactive rain on ganulph falls mainly on the ash plain.

Nobles of the subsector duke's court who have reason to interact with aristocrats closer to the sector metropole would take refresher courses in the metropole dialect before going there. At home, their dialect would likely be that of the people they spend the most time interacting with. If they only associate with their own social class, they'll speak a dialect close to that of the subsector metropole. If they spend their time working closely with the world's indigenous people, they'll gradually begin to sound like that because of habitually needing to make themselves understood.

Conditions encouraging dialects and linguistic drift include the expense and time of travel, and the lack of immediate interstellar media, and tech levels 7 and lower (no planetary internet).

For imperial organizations, fluency in standard galanglic is probably a requirement for voluntary enlistment.

Imo imperial forces would probably recruit, train and deploy in their local regions to reduce transportation time and cost. If scout courier air filters need to be replaced every 6 weeks, a long distance deployment of major fleet elements would leave thousands of expended air filters in its wake, serenely drifting in space. Ground forces I think would almost certainly deploy from nearby subsectors, or the sector at the farthest.

I could see some variation in this. Instead of one dialect being spoken, there might be several, or many, based on ethnicity and home location of the speaker. That is to say, the Count of Argle is expected to have a particular accent associated with his corner of the Empire. For him to not have or use that would be considered a social faux pau.

This might be done to both accommodate various races and such as well as to allow those "in the know" to identify a speaker to a particular region simply by their accent. It would be one more way to sift the social strata, which the nobility would definitely be into doing. The more linear the pecking order, so-to-speak, the better defined the social position and importance of each noble in it.
 
They could enforce the precise court dialect and accent, since you could freeze it at a specific moment in time and spread it through the use of various forms of media.

Likely, it will drift with each generation, as trendy words, expressions, and pronunciations are adopted.
 
They could enforce the precise court dialect and accent, since you could freeze it at a specific moment in time and spread it through the use of various forms of media.

Likely, it will drift with each generation, as trendy words, expressions, and pronunciations are adopted.

We have seen language drift is inevitable over time, but that's based on our relatively recent state of near-universal literacy. Finding out what accents people in different regions had 200 years ago is currently work for an academic, but finding out how someone spoke 100 years ago is just a matter finding a recording. So if elements of the 3I were to enforce a standard for speech and pronunciation, they could draw on recordings made a millennia beforehand. If Some class norms were to speak Galanglic a particular way, that way would be much easier to replicate then than it is for us to now speak with the same accent as someone from 100 years ago. As such, language drift in the 3I could be contained and limited at least within a widespread group such as the nobility.

I once worked with a person who was sent to elocution lessons in order to tone down their rather extreme regional accent so that their workmates and superiors could understand what on earth they were saying. Occasionally their accent would leak out and we'd look at them with bewilderment before they repeated it in recognisable English. I imagine that's the way it would be on 3I naval and scout vessels from time to time.
 
Another important variation in language could be dictated by race.

I'm not sure how the Vargr, or the Aslan, or other races inside the imperium can pronounce several sounds that are easy for humans. Their vocal disposition (e.g. for Vargr, being carnivores, diferent teeth than humans, as lack of incisives, quite improtant for several sounds in speech) may affect their pronunciation.

And this is not something some clases may fix...
 
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yet we have to put up with presenters who can not pronounce 'll' correctly - wall becomes wawl or even waw, ball becomes bawl or baw
A former US President might "Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd at night" (leave his auto streetside in an Ivy League college) and describe "Kuber" (the big island 90 miles south of Florida). No 'R' in the middle of a word, but replace any final 'A' sound with it.

IMTU, if it becomes important to indicate that regions exist, spoken accents are a shorthand way for the players to pick up on that.
For instance, in Milieu ISW, kimashargur, Ziru Sirka officials, and plain old Vilani citizens might sound enough different from each other to distinguish just by ear. Vegans of course are something all their own.
 
Another important variation in language could be dictated by race.

I'm not sure how the Vargr, or the Aslan, or other races inside the imperium can pronounce several sounds that are easy for humans. Their vocal disposition (e.g. for Vargr, being carnivores, diferent teeth than humans, as lack of incisives, quite improtant for several sounds in speech) may affect their pronunciation.

And this is not something some clases may fix...
But technology could, if needed.
 
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