Common (na Xafen)
| Common | |
|---|---|
| na Xafen | |
 Flag of the New World Order | |
| Pronunciation | [[Help:IPA|ˈʃa.ven]] |
| Created by | Peter K. Davidson |
| Setting | Earth 4177 |
| Native speakers | ~800 million, 4.5 billion L2 (2115) |
Old Common
| |
Dialect | Old Common, High Common, various Low Common |
| Official status | |
Official language in | New World Order |
| Regulated by | Na Akkatemi na Xafen Zisse (Common Language Academy) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | qcx |
Common is a language spoken on Earth 4177. In that dimension, almost the entire planet is dominated by a polity called the New World Order. Almost all media obtained from that dimension are in the Common language, although there is ample evidence of natural languages we are familiar with from our own dimension still being spoken. The history of Earth 4177 and our own dimension appear nearly identical until the early 2020s, where they begin to diverge significantly. Because of the dominance of Common in most public life in Earth 4177, the aetherscope has been able to recover ample materials from this dimension but little in the way of exposition on the Common language. Our greatest source on the Common language itself is a blog published in the Free State of Britain, which is apparently the sole remaining polity where English remains dominant.
The writer, who writes under the pseudonym "Trafalgar," writes in English for an English-speaking audience. They appear to be a former adventurer and current academic, and the purpose of their blog is to provide information on Common and the New World Order for British people, and it seems that they write under a pseudonym in order to provide unvarnished opinions without suffering personal, negative consequences. They write as though they may have collaborators, but all posts thus far have been tagged as posted by Trafalgar, and there is no definite evidence of other collaborators.
Earth 4177 is interesting because it is time-slipped relative to our own. For that reason, it is a potential source of new technologies, as well as information and cautions about the dangers we may face in our own time. The aetherscope accesses that dimension at a time point with a constant offset from our own that appears to be approximately 100 years offset. Trafalgar's Common Social Resource blog is mirrored in real time at the link given here, but frustratingly, they don't include the year in their dates and the dates are updated when they edit their articles and increment the revision. Trafalgar's materials are invaluable, however, because they allow us to understand potentially useful materials from Earth 4177 with much greater ease than would otherwise be possible, and their exposition about the New World Order, while necessarily limited and biased, has nevertheless been hugely helpful in understanding the context of other materials recovered from that dimension. They appear to be exceptionally knowledgeable about the New World Order and at least make an attempt at academic objectivity, as a number of their assertions that researches initially questioned turned out to be backed up by other sources.