a linguistic anthropology of fantasy folk

The nice thing about fantasy races is that they give character creation choices with a good degree of granularity and comprehensibility and are a neat way to pull folkloric material into your game. The bad thing about them is that they mean that race science (that is, the false belief that races as understood by society correspond to biologically distinct types of human beings) is true in your fantasy world.

Honestly, the bad part is bad enough to completely sink the goodness of the good part.

This is another in my ongoing struggle to formulate different fantasy folk in a way that isn't race science, but emphasizing the ways that real people saw themselves and others, particularly before the race-scientific idea became prominent in the modern era.

The problem with making things nuanced is that also makes them complicated; race science is conceptually pretty straightforward, which makes it very game-able. Trying to embed fantasy folk in a realistically nuanced web of relationships with each other also buries the conceptual clarity of a player looking at the list of options and saying, "I'm going to play an elf, that means I live in the woods and don't particularly like dwarfs." One runs the risk of overloading the player with world-building, particularly if one chooses to foreground linguistic groups which are among the more salient in-universe distinctions between peoples.

I'm far from a solution to this, but my current idea is to use somewhat-transparent names for languages (or groups of languages) wherever possible, and doing as little "hard" worldbuilding as possible to keep things relatively setting-neutral, while still keeping things complex enough to stop collapsing into the fail state of race science. It's a tall order, let's see how I do.

When making a character, you must choose a people for them to belong to (or at least stem from). A people is defined by a language, a way of life and an alignment, all of which affect how they see themselves and the world.

To make this your own, you only have to identify the peoples in your setting, their languages, ways of life and alignments. You may choose to give every people a distinct ethnonym; I'm not doing this so as not to overload a player with unfamiliar names. Instead, I'm going to organize peoples by language family, grouping setting languages together into four groups (middling, rhuno-buggish, sylvene and foreigner), the first three of which correspond to actual language families. Each family contains a number of peoples with different ways of life and dramatically different outlooks on the world and their place in it.

Middling Peoples

In a time out of memory, a Conqueror swept through these realms and united them by force of arms. The Conqueror died young, their greatest campaigns unwaged and their empire falling to pieces thereafter, they spread the ancestor of the Middle Speech with them.

• All urban and most rustic Middlings speak the Middle Speech as their daily language. They are settled, living primarily by farming and herding, though in the cities many practice trades or serve in the palaces and temples.
  Alignment: we are civil and pious. We respect the Rhunish people of the underworld and the Sylvene peoples of the forest as our elders, but suspect the vulgar dialect-speaking rustics and shiftless itinerants of any sort for their weirding ways. All others are barbarians and heathens against whom we must guard.
• A few Middle-speakers are itinerant entertainers, petty merchants or tinkers, travelling in boats or carts.
  Alignment: we are a pious people like the settled folk, though they scorn us. We hate the weirding of the vulgar rustics or the Riverene itinerants as much as they do. Hobbish peoples of the foothills and Sylvenes of the forest are our elders, though all who dwell in the underworld are hateful goblins.
• Some rustics speak dialect instead of the Middle Speech. Dialect is not a single language, but any one of many minority languages related (some distantly) to the Middle Speech. Middle-speakers cannot usually understand dialect, but dialect-speakers can get by in the Middle Speech, as a rule.
  Alignment: we keep faith with the old ways that city-folk have forgotten. We recognize anyone who shares our dialect as kin, nomad or not, and honor Riverene travelers, Sylvene foresters and Rhunish delvers as elders. Middle-speakers are too proud of themselves to be relied upon, but they are not foes like the barbarians of the hills or the Bugs of the plains.
• Nomadic Middlings, as a rule, speak dialect. They are pastoralists who travel great circuits annually to graze their herds.
  Alignment: we are a free people who kneel for none under the sky. We have no kin among the settled peoples but those who share our dialect and keep the old ways. Thralls who live in cities, towns or woods are good only for raiding, but the half-thralls of boats, carts, hillsides or underworld are sometimes better for trading with than raiding. Free peoples, Middling or Buggish, can be friend or foe as they wish but must be shown honor.

Rhuno-Buggish Peoples

Although different Middling peoples might recognize their kinship to one another, only a linguist could group the Rhuno-Buggish peoples together. The Rhunes are the people most distant from the others, who have long lived in the deep Earth. The above-ground peoples speak an innumerable mess of little languages and dialects that form a great continuum from Hobbish in the mountain foothills to Buggish on the vast plains.

Though Hobs and Rhunes despise one another, there is a great deal of Rhunish admixture in the Hobbish tongue from long contact.

• Most non-Middling nomads speak varieties of Buggish. When they cannot understand the speech of Bugs of another band, they adjust their diction and pronunciation to a more archaic, poetic form of the language that is too formal for everyday use but more intelligible.
  Alignment: we are a free people who kneel for none under the sky. Thralls who live in cities, towns or woods are good only for raiding, but the half-thralls of boats, carts, hillsides or underworld are sometimes better for trading with than raiding. Free peoples, Middling or Buggish, can be friend or foe as they wish but must be shown honor.
• The Hobs of the foothills live by transhumance, bringing their herds into the higher mountain pastures in the summer and returning to their foothill warrens in the winter.
  Alignment: we are goodwrights, masters of crafts learnt from the Earth itself. We will treat or trade with most outsiders, though we are wary of them, but hate all underworld folk as thieves and foes.
• Those who speak Rhunish live in the underworld, in mines and caverns far from the light of day, where they fish in silent seas and rivers and brew heady broths in pools heated by the blood of the Earth.
  Alignment: we are goodwrights, masters of crafts learnt from the Earth itself. We will treat or trade with most outsiders, though we are wary of them, but hate all hillside peoples and our Cavernene neighbors as thieves and foes.

Sylvene Peoples

Out of respect for the wisdom of the elder days, the learned people of the cities and forests both learn the ancient Sylvene tongue and use it as their language of poetry and scholarship. However, few speak it as a daily language; the foresters of the woodlands speak Sylvene vernaculars descended from it (though many know the learned speech as well). By ancient taboo, these foresters will not speak the vernacular of any other tribe. When many tribes gather, the sages speak the ancient tongue and the common folk use a common sign-language rather than pronounce each others' words.

The Riverene tongue, once the common tongue of the realms, is a more distant niece of ancient Sylvene. Riverene was displaced by the Conqueror's Middle Speech and spoken only by a few wanderers. Although the Cavernene tongue is related, few dare to remark upon the fact for the bitter enmity that exists between Carvernenes and the other Sylvene peoples.

• All the forest peoples in the land speak a Sylvene vernacular, though they will not speak any other even if they understand it. They live by hunting and forest gardening, planting fruit- and nut-bearing trees thickly around their dwellings, with under-stories of nourishing bushes, herbs and roots.
  Alignment: we are moonfolk, belonging to neither night nor day but honoring each in its season. The settled peoples and even the Rhunes in their stone halls are dayfolk, and we value them for their strength when the time of war comes. The nomads of the plain and the Cavernenes beneath the Earth who harry us mercilessly are nightfolk, and we give them no quarter when we war upon them. The smallfolk who trade in boats or carts or on hillside cheaping-marts are pleasant enough but not to be taken seriously.
• A minority of itinerant petty merchants and tinkers speak the old Riverene tongue.
  Alignment: we are firstborn, keeping the ways of our ancestors from time immemorial though all else forget. We keep our own counsel and have no love of other settled or wandering peoples, but we do honor the hill-Hobs for their great artistry and trade with them when we can.
• Like their hated enemies, the Rhunes, the Cavernene people live deep below the Earth, brewing broths by the fires of hell and farming fish in sunless pools.
  Alignment: we are firstborn, keeping the ways of our ancestors from time immemorial though all else forget. No outsider is to be trusted, but most of all we hate the forest-folk who have abandoned our ancestral ways and the horrible Rhunes who invade our sunless world.

Foreigners

Foreigners are not a true group of peoples. The important thing about foreign peoples is that they are distant and unfamiliar; the game will not bring you into contact with your own kin or country-folk unless you go looking for them, in all likelihood. Foreigner characters may be exiles or refugees, stranded merchants or sailors; they should have some command of the Middle Speech but if they are learned it should be after the fashion of their home countries rather than the Sylvene or Rhunish letters that are known in these parts.

Honestly, I think I'm unlikely to improve upon Phlox's barbarian for now, so I'll just link it here.