Common

The Common language, typically known as "Common" (more rarely, "Athenian"), is the lingua franca spoken by mortals throughout the Material Plane. It was given to mortals by the goddess Athena at the dawning of the Age of Complexity.

From Zeus's forehead whence she had emerged, Lady Athena reached her hand once more and pulled a lightning bolt forth. She threw the lightning-lance into the sky, screaming the first word all mortals might hear: Understand! When the bolt hit the cloud, its thunderclap echoed through all mortal minds, and its echoes were a beautiful language of peace that all mortals knew.
—Legend of the Athenian Tongue

Sages believe that the language struck every mortal who knew at least one language at the time of the Litigation of Flames. The explorers on the L'invitacion, upon reaching the Mystic Lands, found that they could communicate fluently in Common with the animal-like sentient species that inhabited the lands.
Though most individual cultural tongues, such as Elvish and Gnomish, have retained their popularity, most of Belcantas's regional Human languages, such as Gaenoa and High Achlyssian, died out in the early centuries of the Age of Complexity. The Halfling tongue, originally a dialect of the proto-Dreibach human tongue, still flourishes, as do several of the languages of Desarmín. As Athena and her Olympian Dynasty cohorts are largely human gods, though, most human cultures see Common as their birthright and their most natural native language.
Common uses the same twenty-eight letter alphabet as Celestial. Over time, the Common language has adopted loanwords from many other mortal and immortal languages.

Root Languages

• Celestial

Spoken by

• Dwarven
• Elven
• Gnomish
• Halfling
• Human
• Humanoid
• Orokhim