Guild Wars 2

Do not get me wrong i know this is a game but i was wondering if there was an canon reason why everybody can understand each other. For example the asura come from the depths of tyria completly isolated from everybody else yet they speak the same language as spoken top side. The kodan lived isolated on giant floating ice city’s and speak the same language.

If there is no real lore related to this hit me with your best idea/story about it.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cultural_Diffusion_in_Contemporary_Kryta

That was a fast answer, thank you.

Also some Asura and Dwarves was already in contact with each other in EoTn
so they may already had a ideal of some of the surface language

Diovid’s link primarily talks about the written alphabet, not spoken language.

But that one’s relatively easy to answer too. Humans were very widespread and very influential for thousands of years, and they were allied to/communicated with tengu, Forgotten, dwarves, naga, and mursaat for quite some time. Dwarves, in turn, had lasting or historical communication with asura, norn, jotun, Seer, mursaat, and Forgotten. Norn had historical communication with the charr.

Charr, norn, and other races all had their own spoken language (charr’s being mostly grunts and growls – animal-like speech). Given the Exalted mastery line, so did the Forgotten.

Effectively, for some time, races had a rough understanding of other races’ speech, and like the written system, the spoken language would over time unify as well – otherwise a unified written system would be largely pointless.

Edit:

I also recall someone mentioning a dev saying that a common language was formed during the previous dragonrise, while Glint sheltered the surviving races. This doesn’t make much sense to me, however, as The Ecology of the Charr mention the commonly spoken language to be “the human language” – given that there’s known history between dwarf/Forgotten and charr, it would make more sense for the charr to call it “the dwarven language” or “the Forgotten language” or some such.

Well possibly the charr would call it the human language because they first heard it spoken by humans, even if it was originally the dwarven or forgotten language. Usually the first name something gets “sticks” even if it is inaccurate.
An example in linguistics that comes to mind would be the dialect of danube swabian. The name implies that it is a form of swabian, but it is in fact a variation of the palatinatian dialect. It got its name because the first wave of german settlers on the balkans were swabians, but soon they were outnumbered by settlers from the palatinate area, who had the bigger impact on the spoken language. The name stuck however and is still used today.

They interacted with the Forgotten (and likely the dwarves) before they interacted with humans.

But I get what you mean.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Effectively, for some time, races had a rough understanding of other races’ speech, and like the written system, the spoken language would over time unify as well – otherwise a unified written system would be largely pointless.

With a system where the symbols each represent an individual sound (like New Krytan and European languages), yes… although I note that Western Europe does have a unified written system in the form of the Latin alphabet even thought the written languages are quite different.

For written systems such as most Asian languages where symbols usually stand for whole words rather than individual sounds, though, it would work – if you have a symbol that represents ‘cow’, for instance, it doesn’t matter if one person pronounces it ‘cow’ and the other person pronounces it ‘gnarf’ if they both recognise that it means the same animal. In fact, I have a suspicion that such written systems may have evolved in the first place to allow for written communications within a large empire with multiple spoken languages. They may well have started off from two tribes who didn’t share a spoken language drawing pictures in the ground.

Of course, New Krytan does have an alphabet which represents sounds rather than concepts, so the above isn’t really relevant to Tyria. However, it does illustrate that it might not be necessary to share a spoken language to share a written one.