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Ban the Common language

Let’s not bury the lede: I want you to remove the Common language from your D&D games. Instead, you should nominate a native language for each character, and every other language becomes a secondary language.

Does Common == English?

The Common Tongue is how the surface dwellers of Faerûn speak. Everyone I’ve asked says Common is a stand-in for English. I’d like to think that’s just my regional bias though, and players in Japan hear Common as Japanese, players in Brazil hear Portuguese, but I might be wrong: maybe they imagine their characters are speaking English too. Why is that?

English, Arabic, Mandarin and Spanish are the most commercially lucrative languages to learn in 2025, because each is a popular lingua franca, a secondary bridging language between disparate speakers. Is Common like English because it’s a lingua franca, which elves learn to speak with dwarves?

Or how about in Singapore where Singlish cobbles together English and a bunch of regional Asian languages as a creole. Is Common like English because it’s a creole, so elves, dwarves and halflings can all understand bits and pieces?

But the Common Tongue definitely isn’t English, because Common is ubiquitous and English is not. Common is smooth; English is bumpy.

English is bumpy

In the mid 1800s, many Welsh schools ran classes which exclusively spoke English. The Welsh language was banned and if you were caught speaking it, you’d have to wear palm-sized wooden panel on a necklace called the Welsh Not. I don’t know whether the ban and punishment were meant to help the students learn English, or if it were some kind of coordinated linguistic genocide, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is: language is bumpy!

When Russia invades Ukraine, the justification is the number of Russian-speakers in Crimea. When Germany annexes a chunk of Czechoslovakia, the justification is number of German-speakers in Sudetenland. Then you’ve got Trump issuing an executive order to designate English as the official language of the US, and McDonald’s banning employees in Australia from speaking any language other than English while on duty. Our lives and relationships have been carved up in deliberate ways over disagreements about languages.

Common is smooth

Your story is worse-off with this frictionless, universal translator that lets elves and orcs communicate while side-stepping geopolitical baggage. Where’s my drama, where’s the juice? I would much rather these fictional languages carried the same texture as real-world languages, shaped by history, culture and conflict.

Some spitball ideas for rules

My worry is that Common’s only purpose is as a quality-of-life feature, and that removing it might constitute hostile game design. For world-building, I’m certain removing Common is a good idea. But implementing it at the table needs more thought from a gameplay perspective, so I’m approaching this cautiously for now, though I already see some opportunities for game mechanics.

• In any instance you would learn a new language, that language becomes a secondary language.
• Alternatively, when you would otherwise learn a new language, you can instead become fluent in a secondary language you already know.
• When speaking a secondary language, you have a discernible accent related to your native language.
• When speaking a fluent language, you have a much less discernible accent related to your native language.
• Any checks involving spoken or written information using secondary languages have disadvantage.

And then I am also faced with some challenges.

• Is there any juice in separating knowledge of spoken language and written language?
• Should the number of languages be limited by your Intelligence ability score?
• Could an adventuring party function if not all characters shared a language?
• How does this affect spells like Comprehend Languages and Tongues?
• Should some languages be segregated as secret, scholarly or dead languages, which can’t be learned conventionally?