I try to avoid it mostly because it's an incredible hassle. You want the reader to understand it, which for many of us here, means it is in english. But for a complete world, it clearly needs more than one language. Science fiction is even worse, since any single planet could have hundreds of languages on its own, all with sufficient number of speakers to constitute a major thriving language.
I haven't really decided myself how to handle it.
You could just work off of the name of one of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain: Anglian, or Mercian perhaps.
I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.Aye, in situations like the one you're discussing, name it something like Common or Trade or the like. Another option, because Golden Sun is based off Earth, is to use Sabir as the name - Sabir was the original Mediterranean lingua franca of the Medieval era, so should work as well!
As to what I use as a name for the language that people are assumed to be speaking in my fantasy world, it's called Caelean, and is basically Latin - having achieved its place of dominance because it's the language of the major church as well as the language of the former empire that ruled the region. The English-equivalent is based off the Scots language, and called Umbrish, after the Isle of Umbria from whence it came, but when I write it out "I been apparin lak tha"
JHM: But is there an Anglia or Mercia in Golden Sun?
Why not take the name of the world, and work off of that?
Oh and if this helps, I can't just call the tongue of 6th century Scandinavians "Proto-Germanic" or "Proto-Norse" or any variation on the modern names given to the language, so I just name it after the locale. If you're in Denmark, it's Danish. If you're in Geatland, it's Geatish. It works because the dialect is probably a little different in different places, even if it's really all the same language.
It's not perfect though—I don't know what to call it when Danes and Geatas are speaking together.
edited 25th Apr '11 5:57:47 AM by annebeeche
Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.
Hmm... Point taken, I have no clue....
Sabir is a pidgin language which is what you tend to get when you start with a mix of different languages. Pidgins mix words together while stripping down the grammatical complexity. Allegedly, the term "long time, no see" came out of the USA where English mixed with native languages. So each nation would have it's own language plus a number of pidgins. For simplicity sake there could be a "common" pidgin that everyone uses, sort of like an organic Esperanto. However, I suspect that conveying complex, abstract ideas would be difficult unless the language had a long time to develop. Latin funtioned as a common language of academia. Everyone in, say, the 16th century wrote their textbooks in Latin so everyone else could read it regardless if they were English, French, German or Spanish.
Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you are probably right.

Okay, so I've got a problem. I'm trying to write a Golden Sun fanfic centered around the Djinn. This is all fine and dandy, blah blah blah, explanations that Djinn can communicate sort-of-telepathically with Adepts of their own element and have to speak English to talk to everyone else, etcetera.
Then, as I was playing out the explanation in my mind, I hit a roadblock: what is the spoken language called in Golden Sun? There's no apparent Translation Convention going on; they're fairly obviously speaking English (or Japanese, or whatever language you play the game in).
Then I realized that this applies to a lot of fantasy universes; you can't just say 'the Insert-Country-Here language' or 'the human/other species language,' because there's usually more than one country and species (and besides, referring to it as 'the human/etc. language' would just sound odd).*
There's a little more room to maneuver if you're writing your own world, but what do you do when you're writing a fanfic?
Still working on Good Style, so bear with me.