In DragonWing, my male MC, Noren, a young man from a small wilderness village, visits the city. And the way a lot of the people in the city talk sounds … sloppy, less articulate, more slurred to him. Not that he really thinks about it that much.

But it certainly does not sound more educated. The people he encounters do not have larger vocabularies or more poetic speech patterns.

If anything, he does. Certainly, some of the ways he puts things are rather simple, but his speech is not “backwards.” And it does not sound to him like those in the city are more eloquent or better-spoken.

Why? Shouldn’t this half-way-between-hunter-and-farmboy talk like one?

The answer is, what does it really mean to talk like one?

I like to learn things, and I tend to remember things that are interesting to me. Facts that can shed light on human experiences. And one of the things that has come to my attention is that the languages of “primitive peoples” are often not at all what you would consider primitive or poor if you actually learn anything about.

Sometimes, they are incredibly eloquent and richly poetic. They have myriad words with precise and poetic meanings. The way they see the world is not poorer, or composed of less colors, than more “educated” peoples. Not that language is the measure of richness in human life, or any life, but language is today’s subject.

No, if anything, it seems to me it’s the “educated” languages that are poorer and more abstract. They may be complex, but they’re not richer. They don’t have more depth of meaning, though they might be more accessible to people who have grown up in an “educated” society.

It is the downtrodden and oppressed of such “educated” societies who often show languages that are poor. And to emphasize this again: I am not saying their thoughts are poor, or that they cannot be poets or philosophers! Far be it from me to ever imply such a thing!

I am saying that my understanding of history and language is that for the most part their languages are the primary examples of poor vocabularies with few complex words. I’m not saying that’s always the case, or they don’t have their own ways of conveying thoughts. I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions. I’m not talking about that at all.

I’m just saying, the languages of people who don’t have semi-modern “educated” societies can be just as beautiful and complex, and probably more poetic, rich, and varied than our language. Even the richest of educated language seems to me poor compared to the poetry I know of other languages. It’s different, yes, but not superior or richer.

Thus, it is the people in the cities, the more “civilized” lowland peoples who have the condensed language. It might be more complicated in some ways, but it’s at the cost of other richness. To them, Noren’s speech probably does sound a little simple sometimes, but it also sounds a little poetic, a little out-of-date, a little archaic. In fact, sometimes people take him for the traveling son of some distant noble.

He’s not from an oppressed class, worked into the ground so they don’t have time and energy for the arts. He’s from a mountain village, with a rich intellectual life of its own.

So, please, the next time you run into a character in a fantasy setting who’s talking in a more educated way than you expected, or using more and “bigger” words, take a step back and consider whether it might be reasonable. Because it isn’t necessary to go to a university or have an “education” to have rich intellectual life or beautiful poetry. Even peasants who aren’t overly oppressed and taxed can have rich, poetic ways of putting things. They wouldn’t sound like what you’d hear at court, but they would have their own eloquence to them, and they might not be as different as you think, not in all ways. They would certainly come from a very different experience of the world, but not a poorer one!

After all, where have all the fairytales come from? Where do most of the poetic expressions originate? What’s the root they grow from?

It’s not the palaces. If the folk tales and the mythology come from palaces, then they come from palaces either very long ago and far away, or in another world, and they come through the man who hunts the deer and tills the soil.

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