My favorite and also least favorite part about being a linguist is trying to figure out what the linguistic landscape of a fantasy world is. Not only that, but really good authors can use language to tell the reader things and convey themes. Take the Locked Tomb universe; we learn basically nothing until Nona the Ninth, where we learn that the Houses speak seemingly one single language, simply referred to as "House." We learn that House is also spoken as a lingua franca on Houses-occupied planets, that is, as a language of trade and communication so that people of all different backgrounds may communicate (the role that English plays today in real life), and that there are dialects or at least accented versions spoken in local communities. When the broadcast from the Empire occurs, Ianthe Naberius mentions that it will be translated into the, if I recall correctly, ~15 local languages. This really paints a stark contrast between the Nine Houses and the non-aligned/Blood of Eden-controlled planets/human settlements— the houses all seemingly speak the same language, they may have each developed their own cultures to a degree, but John specifically made everyone as uniform as possible after the Resurrection; cf. Wake's claims of cultural and linguistic genocide. Meanwhile, in human settlements outside of the Houses proper, different varieties continue to flourish and cultures remain distinct and alive. One thing that has bugged me as unrealistic about this is that naturally, over 10,000 years, language is going to change, and I mean drastically change. Even if you created the Houses with one, uniform culture and language, they're going to splinter no matter how centralized you make them, especially if one house decides to go all isolationist (cough cough the ninth house cough cough). But, to be fair, Tamsyn's characters never mention accents of their own within the Houses, nor do they mention a lack of them I believe, so it's possible that variation does exist and it's simply not mentioned. A more fun idea, though less realistic perhaps (of course the most realistic thing is just that this isn't something the author considered too deeply as I do not believe she is a linguist lmao), is that the static nature of language in the Houses is a parallel to the static nature of death and necromancy, death has lost much of its meaning, so why not preserve the form of a language too in an unnatural and death-defying way? It would be yet another aspect of the Nine Houses that John could control, and we know he's got a thing about control.
Anyways I started this post to do a little rant on how I always am trying to decide what accent to give characters in my head, and it turned into this, so... there's gonna be a part two where I talk about Red Rising probably! Anyhow Gideon speaks with an American accent in my head 100% I refuse to change that, Not Sorry. Also god it was difficult but I've managed to get fairly good at doing a NZ accent in my head for John. My deepest fear is that House is really just NZ English and that everyone speaks like a Kiwi and I'd die trying to read every single character like that in my head lmfao. Sorry to the great nation of Aotearoa New Zealand, I just have not consumed enough of your media to make it easy to replicate in my head. Another aspect to think on that I am promising myself right now I won't go into it too much, but it'd be really interesting to go into how John's Māori identity interacts with his identity overall; he clearly speaks at least some Te Reo, yet it seems clear that he was willing to forsake his identity and language when creating his new (fascist) utopia after the Resurrection. But that's not something I really feel I can speak on lmao, so I won't!
