Remember the shield marcher in Diablo Cut?

Ratbeard reads it but the writing is in Monquistan? How does Ratbeard know Monquistan writing?

anecorbie on Mar 4, 2016 wrote:

Someone asked this before, we had no "official" answer, but my speculation went like this:
"Ratbeard, being old, has explored many skyways, he learned to speak monquistan and polarian from the pretty ladies there."

I suppose he just fills in because we don't get a universal monquistan companion and it doesn't make sense for any of our companions to read Monquistan but maybe Old Scratch could conjure up an undead monkey to read this for us?

Serpent10611 on Mar 5, 2016 wrote:

I don't think it's that he learned to speak it 'cause it seems that everyone in the Spiral speaks English, with different accents thrown in to coincide with their real-world counterpart. For the most part, I think that the main language of the Spiral is English and that it's the written language that differs between worlds. I'm not saying that there aren't different languages, the troggies and watermoles prove that in some regard, but the fact that pretty much everyone else speaks fluent English (accented but still fluent) doesn't really give us much in the way of lingual diversity beyond the written form.

Yet ships across the Spiral use names in reference to their culture - and often in a different language. You notice this most commonly in Cool Ranch ( Santo Pollo ) and Aquila. Remember how Ratbeard tells El Toro the name for a sandwich in Polarian?
So we can assume ( in game terms ) that everyone is speaking a basic language that is known among all skyfaring species. Also this is a way to keep from confusing us with foreign languages.
We haven't seen much written languages beyond the Diablo Cut gravestone and the Rosetta Stone.

anecorbie on Mar 6, 2016 wrote:

Yet ships across the Spiral use names in reference to their culture - and often in a different language. You notice this most commonly in Cool Ranch ( Santo Pollo ) and Aquila. Remember how Ratbeard tells El Toro the name for a sandwich in Polarian?
So we can assume ( in game terms ) that everyone is speaking a basic language that is known among all skyfaring species. Also this is a way to keep from confusing us with foreign languages.
We haven't seen much written languages beyond the Diablo Cut gravestone and the Rosetta Stone.

Oops. . .
Ok, ok, ya got me there, I totally forgot about the ship names. Though I have no clue about Ratbeard talking about sandwiches. In my opinion, names are a bit different from actually speaking the language. Take scientific naming for example; we use Latin and Greek words to classify plants and animals but the languages themselves aren't really practiced anymore, at least not to my knowledge. Egyptian might be a worth mentioning too; we may be able to translate some hieroglyphics but I highly doubt anyone knows what the spoken words were. Btw, we have seen written languages besides the grave and Rosetta stones; the scroll of secrets, El Dorado map, and this "simple code the Armada favors" we learn of in Valencia.
My theory is that, at one point, every world had their own native language. Eventually, as sky ships became an abundance and stormgates to other worlds became more accessible (and trade began to pick up), native languages may have slowly become more and more recessed. Today, English may have become the dominant oral language in the Spiral while the native languages are mostly used only in the written form and in names.
The Bison aside, I think it's only the tribal creatures the still retain their native language to some degree or another. The Troggies obviously can't speak any English at all (besides that tree frog in the Isle of Doom). The Watermoles know English but it's more obvious that it's a second language. The Aztecasaurs speak English for the most part but they still refer to some thing in their native tongue. At the very least, every other sapient creature knows English as their first language 'cause their fluency speaking it doesn't really suggest otherwise.