Common Tongue
Common Tongue or Common, for short, is an engineered language most commonly used by humans. It is the most widespread and used language in Aasha even if it isn't most people's first language.
History
After the formation of the Circle of Sages, the Sages long sought for a common-language that all mortals could speak as a medium for disseminating and collecting knowledge. At first, the Sages, under the direction of Erudwen Lanagathor, chose to record all of their research in Elven since the Sages were primarily concerned with preserving Elven history and culture. With the introduction of other mortal races into the ranks of the Sages, Elven became a difficult archival language. Elvish had a few drawbacks that the Sages had to overcome. The first, was that Elvish, while a beautiful and exact language, is verbose and character heavy. It took lots more characters to convey a thought than Dwarven or many of the Human languages. The second was that many of the mortal races had difficulty mastering Elvish in their short lifespans - especially humans, gnomes, and halflings. Many of the so-called human experts on Elvish had difficulty pronouncing the language correctly and only had the vocabulary to read and write in a particular field. In 620's AA, after few generations of humans struggled with Elvish, Erudwen Lanagathor decided that a new archival language was needed in order to preserve the Sages' order and mission. So a small working group of Sages were set apart to search for or create of a new universal language. It took the committee almost 100 years to come up with a system suitable for all races and a plan to spread the language throughout Aasha.Designing Common Tongue
The Sages decided that Common should be based on a Human language. Humans tended to travel and explore all over Aasha, and making it easier for humans to learn would hasten its adoption. Human languages tended to be more concise than Elvish, and, having a phonetic alphabet, lacked the wrote memorization needed to read and write Dwarvish glyphs. The committee devised a system where Common would use the majority of a human language with the 100 most common Dwarvish glyphs as nouns to make it even more concise. Elvish words were to be used if an appropriate world could not be found in the human language.Common and Elysia
The Sages in order to facilitate quick adoption of the language, decided that they had to convince the Eight Churches to adopt it first. Since the majority of the churches had a large presence in The Holy Kingdom of Elysia, the Sages decided to base Common Tongue on the Elysian Human Dialect to make it easier for the churches to transition. As one of her greatest achievements, in 755AA Erudwen Lanagathor convinced the Church of Light, the Church of the Moon, and the Church of Meilliki to switch to Common Tongue as their official language. Slowly in the next 100 years the remainder of the churches adopted Common Tongue. With Common Tongue being the language of both research and religion, its influence and usage spread all over Aasha. Erudwen Lanagathor ordered that all texts in the Great Library be translated to Common from their respective languages.Proliferation
The use of common has spread throughout all of Aasha in the thousands of years since its adoption. All nations have recognized that to be successful literacy in common is essential, since it is the official language of the Great Library and the Eight Churches. Some human nations have even adopted it as their official language. Like all languages, common is spoken differently in different regions; however, thanks to the Sages who try to maintain the Common Standard all dialects of Common are mutually intelligible.Geographical Distribution
Mostly among humans. All travelers are almost required to know common.
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