Culture vs. Language (Longish)

[cookie-damage]

I've been looking at some of the recent culture threads and I love many of the suggestions. This might be a common suggestions, so I'm sorry if someone suggested this already but it's been something that's been bugging me. In CK2 it seems like "culture" (nebulous, hard to define) and language are meshed together. For some areas, like pre-1066 England, it's not so bad. Most residents there spoke Anglo-Saxon, and had an Anglo-Saxon "culture", and were ruled by Anglo-Saxon elites (except for the Danelaw, other Norse areas, etc).

If you start with the 769 AD start date, you'll notice that much of France falls under the Frankish culture, and much of Iberia falls under the Visigothic, Suebi, and Andalusian cultures, but I'm not sure that these designations are historically accurate. First, of course, language and culture can be related but are not exactly the same. I'm not a historian so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that in the eighth century, most of the inhabitants of France spoke Gallo-Roman despite being ruled by Franks, and for Iberia, some type of transitory Latin which was evolving into Spanish, despite them being ruled by Goths, then Arabs. How much did the Germanic languages of the elites seep into the majority languages? I cannot imagine it was that much, since Iberia and France have continued to speak Romantic languages (albeit with many influences from Germanic and others).

That's not to say that these people weren't "culturally" Frankish or Suebi or Visigothic despite speaking Romance languages, but I don't really know if it's historically accurate to have huge swaths of land be painted as such either when the majority of the non-elite population, as I understand, didn't speak these Germanic languages. Unless of course masses of people ended up speaking Suebian, but I think not. What I am bugged by is that culture and language are mashed together, and CK2 seems to be making the claim that huge swaths of France and Iberia were culturally this and that when I'm not sure that's the case.

What I would love CK3 to introduce would be a linguistic feature: What language do the inhabitants of the province speak? We already have a culture of individual characters, and that pretty much means what language they speak as well, but I want a province level language ID and a province level cultural ID.

For example, Paris, 769.
Culture: Frankish (is this accurate?)
Language: Gallo-Roman, Proto-French, whatever you want to call it

Metz, 769
Culture: Frankish
Language: Old High German

Toledo, 769
Culture: Visigothic
Language: Ibero-Roman, Proto-Castilian, etc

I think CK3 should also hire some historians and linguistics people and actually figure out what the culture of these areas were at the time, because defining culture is incredibly hard and one must consider religion, language, and sociology. For a video game, it may not need to be that in depth, but more accuracy never hurts.

 

[Ezumiyr]

Sure, but what for?
The ability to speak a certain language is just one of the many different possible components of one's culture, and it's different depending on the culture. Sometimes it doesn't really matter if everyone doesn't speak the same language as long as they have the same religion. Sometimes it's a very defining part of a population's identity. But in most cases it's not the only factor.

Mechanically, having just cultures work, because the game doesn't need a more complex system. IRL of course the culture map of CK would be terrible.
Paris wasn't "frankish" in 789. There were different people of different origins whose lingua franca was an oil (romance) dialect.

Btw, in the 8th century in France there was a big dialectic continuum of romance languages. Those are sometimes collectively called "Gallo-Roman" but they were already very different from the latin spoken by gallo-roman people of the roman period, and generally we just use the generic "old french" after 750. This highlights another difficulty: languages in the middle ages were far from homogeneous, so at best we could use language families. Another problem is that while languages are fairly well known in certain areas, for others like eastern europe we only have some vague ideas.

And of course the problem is further complicated by modern nationalism and identity politics. In the middle ages, nobody really thought about cultural areas and what defined your cultural identity. As a general rule, you had a vulgar tongue spoken by everyone, the religion of your people, a social status. Your social status had a lot more influence on which languages you spoke than your culture.

 

[AndrejK]

Linguistic identity was certainly a thing. Remember the massacre of the French by the Flemish when they were asked to say "Skild en vriend" Those who said with a French accent, were killed on the spot

 

[fall back]

What you have to remember is that 769 isn’t in the game yet however the separation of the elite and the commoners isn’t a bad thing it could make playing as a conqueror fun haveing to balance the locals with the men you brought from home and the new unrest system plays into this nicely with the more foreign the province the harder it is to control