Touching Alignment Languages with a Barge Pole

One way to think of alignment languages is to think of them as a kind of slang or jargon - a special manner of speaking which people of certain classes or interest groups start to develop.

I was thinking about this earlier today while attending an academic conference at one of the UK's most elite "old school" universities. I won't mention which university or the subject, but it was one of those instances in which an ordinary person would be fully justified in leveling against academics the accusation that we are all ivory-tower-dwelling, clean-fingernailed, over-educated, lily-livered fantasists who ought to go out and get a real job rather than sponging off the state to support our meaningless, divorced-from-reality "scholarship". At various times, such ordinary people would come in to the hall to deliver coffee or sandwiches or croissants or whatever. And whenever I did so, I thought to myself, "They must be listening to this and wondering what on earth we are talking about." Academicspeak is in a sense a bit like what an alignment language might be like: the words are intelligible to anybody, but they are used in such a way to make the content of a conversation inscrutable to outsiders.

Hobbies are like this too: listen to two people talk about a genre of music you don't know about, or an art movement you've never heard of, or some obscure interest like koi carp, and you'll find it hard to follow the conversation because of its special vocabulary and subject matter. There is even something approaching this phenomenon in political discussions. The conversations between people who are united in the same political persuasion tend to have their own cadences, their own in-jokes and nods/winks and reference points, which will leave others cold or nonplussed.

This is really, I think, a sensible way to think of alignment languages. But it's also a bit boring and, more importantly, isn't really true to the source material: alignment languages aren't described as being jargons. They're described as actual languages of a sort (comprised of "passwords, hand-signals and other body motions", as the RC puts it) which, in a sense, transcend all borders, racial differences, and geographical features: if you're lawful evil, you can communicate with all lawful evil creatures even if you don't share a common spoken language.

What to make of this? It implies certain things which are very difficult to conceptualise or imagine working in reality:

1) Alignment is something which has a known existence within the game world itself: you know what alignments are, and you know what alignment you are. It's not just a shorthand way to describe character traits. It's a real phenomenon.
2) Once you change alignment, you stop understanding the previous alignment language and start understanding a different one.
3) You should be able to look at two people having a discussion in an alignment language that isn't your own, and know that they are conversing in their alignment language (because suddenly starting to use "passwords, hand-signals and other body motions" to chat to that hobgoblin must make it pretty obvious).
4) If you could see somebody speaking in their alignment language, and if you knew the alignment of the other party to the conversation, you could guess the first person's alignment. If A is speaking in an alignment language to a hobgoblin, you know that A is lawful evil.

And even setting that to one side, there's also the question: what do the "passwords, hand-signals and other body motions" look like? Apart from sounding vaguely dirty, there isn't a great deal of information there. Maybe Chaotic Evil involves maniacal a-rhythmic dancing, while Lawful Neutral is a highly circumscribed set of deliberate gestures which must be performed perfectly in order for the meaning to be communicated. Maybe Neutral Evil involves blood-letting and pain.

The notion that alignment is something which people in D&D worlds actually believe is something that needs further analysis. Today, having spent so long listening to ivory tower academic nonsense, I'm incapable of doing so, so the most you're getting out of me is this half-formed and somewhat half-arsed blog entry.