Franterra
Spoken In: Everywhere; the common tongue of Adamah.
Function: Trade / Common.
Origin: A merchant creole born of the Sundering War, grown in the crossroads markets rather than descended from any heritage tongue.
Common Use: Trade, travel, and any dealing across language lines; the default tongue every character begins play knowing.
Franterra is no one's mother tongue and everyone's second. It was not handed down by a people or decreed by a throne. It grew in the markets.
When the Sundering War scattered Adamah's peoples and threw strangers together at the crossroads to trade, the old tongues could not reach across the table. What reached across was a pidgin: a working speech stitched from whatever words the traders had in common, simplified until a Dwôrf, a gnome, and an elf could close a deal before the lamps burned out. Generation by generation the merchants' children grew up speaking it, and the pidgin thickened into a language.
It spread because it belongs to no one. To speak Aerlyish in a foreign market is to speak the Federation's tongue, and to bow a little to the Federation. To speak Franterra is to bow to no one, because no nation owns it. That neutrality, not any empire or army, is why it stuck. A throne cannot forbid a language that was never its to begin with.
The name is the merchants' own. Franterra: the free-land speech, the tongue of the road rather than the blood. It is the one language on Adamah that tells you nothing about where a person is from, only that they have somewhere to be and something to sell.
"I've heard a hundred tongues come through this market. I close in Franterra with every one of them. You want to know where a man is from, listen to how he curses when the scale tips against him. You want to sell him grain, speak Franterra."
— a crossroads market-broker, Storvhall
Phonology (IPA)
This page has no sound table, so the following is a PROPOSED common-denominator inventory for a market creole (pending sign-off), not a transcription.
Consonants (proposed): /p b t d k ɡ m n f v s z ʃ h l r j w/
Vowels (proposed): /a e i o u/
Notable: deliberately small and easy for any speaker to approximate; no marked or rare sounds.