Common

Common (also known as "the Common language" and more technically as "Wide-Access Language") is a meta-communicative phenomenon that began occurring in 2004, following the construction of the Second Tower of Babel, that allows individuals who do not understand each other's languages to still communicate by speaking. While often referred to colloquially as a language, it is independent of phonology, morphology, syntax, and appears to be incompatible with orthography. Common's mechanisms are largely unknown, and are a topic of constant research and debate.

Common is primarily used to facilitate communication between two or more individuals who are not capable of speaking and understanding one shared language. Common is not a specific language, but more aptly described as a manner of speaking- at will and with virtually no effort, a speaker can choose to "encode" their message in Common. There are no observable changes in the speech sounds or patterns of the speaker when this occurs, but to any listener (provided they are able to "receive" Common), a Common-encoded utterance will be perceived as an utterance in their own native language, with the semantic and pragmatic content of the utterance being preserved as best as possible. This process has been likened to "mental subtitling". Due to differences in language and meta-communication, the perceived speech quality of Common utterances are often degraded, but still intelligible; this is most notable in the use of Common between speakers of greatly different languages, often resulting in somewhat stilted-sounding speech for both parties. The pragmatics of a statement encoded in Common typically degrade easier than the semantics.

Common is extremely widespread, seemingly appearing naturally in humans (as well as many other sentient species/entities) since the Wide-Access Language Phenomenon began. As with most linguistic developments, the age at which children can make use of Common varies greatly from child to child, and it seems that children can receive Common earlier than they can encode with it. The rate of inability to receive or encode Common is remarkably low compared to many common language impairments. To receive Common, the speech signal being encoded must be perceivable to the listener- for this reason, a deaf individual can not receive Common from an oral speaker, and likewise a blind individual can not receive Common from a gestural speaker. Some entities, most notably speech-using artificial intelligence constructs, find difficulty or are completely incapable in using Common, though language framework and translation software is often used to mitigate this. Aside from examples like these, while Common is optional to encode in, it is automatically understood by any viable receiver.

Common notably does not work with writing, and provides no help in reading or understanding a message in a script nor language that the reader is unfamiliar with.

Trivia

 * The Second Tower of Babel and Common started as a one-off joke to explain why characters in Art Heaven can speak and understand characters they logically would not otherwise.
 * This page is only as long as it is in case something important comes up with this. I'm so sorry.