I Really Enjoy The Linguistic Anaylasis And This Just Enriches The Story So Much

I really enjoy the linguistic anaylasis and this just enriches the story so much

I saw this post by @danosphere91 and I was going to reblog it and just ramble in the tags for a minute, but it got way too long for tag rambling very fast and I figured if I’m going to ramble I may as well just go ahead and let myself ramble for days. 

‘Cause, like, I’ve been thinking about One Piece having different languages since somewhere around Alabasta in my first watch, and I always kind of low-key headcanon it as being a thing going on in the background.

Like, there’s a standard language enforced by the World Government, but of course it gets tweaked a bit as the years go by and some islands don’t have much contact with other islands, and then there are places the World Government doesn’t control and it’s really anybody’s guess whether or not the people there will be able to speak a language anyone recognizes. While most of each individual sea speaks the same language, most islands in the Grand Line have their own languages, since going between islands can be so difficult. One of the most notable exceptions is the islands connected by the sea train, which have agreed upon a shared language to make trading easier. 

The Marines all speak the standard language, and officially that’s all they’re really supposed to speak, though most are aware that there are some circumstances that call for a language shift. A good early indicator of what sort of person any given marine is is how willing they are to cycle through languages and dialects until they find the one the person they’re talking to is most comfortable conversing in. (Akainu probably doesn’t speak anything but Standard.)

The East Blue group has a bunch of inside jokes that only work in the East Blue dialect, and sometimes they’ll try to make a new one and it just completely falls apart because the slang in Syrup Village is not at all compatible with the slang in Cocoyasi Village and then everyone is just speaking nonsense. 

Luffy’s language skills are just a fucking mess because he learned some from Garp, and some from the people in Windmill Village, and the entire time Shanks was in town and for like two weeks after Luffy just practiced talking the way Shanks did, and then he learned stuff from the mountain bandits and Ace and Sabo and people in the Grey Terminal so it’s all just a mashup of different grammar rules and slang terms and everything else until he’s almost speaking a different language altogether. You know how he does that thing where, after having something explained, he’ll go ‘ah, its a mystery (insert thing here)’? It’s partially because his standard isn’t very good and, rather than try to cross the language gap, he just lets it go. He usually understands a lot more than people think, he just doesn’t have the language skills to communicate it. 

Sanji isn’t much better; the fighting chefs come from all over the East Blue - to say nothing of all the language quirks Zeff picked up in the Grand Line and from his crew - and it shows. He’s a little more aware of it than Luffy though, and can usually at least pick one style and stick with it for the sake of consistency over the course of a conversation. His ability to do this slips when he gets mad, and he’ll also start adding in stuff from the language he spoke while living in the North Blue - his arguments with Zoro usually dissolve into physical fights around the time no one can tell what he’s saying anymore. It’s even worse against enemies - Black Leg Sanji is known as ‘that one Straw Hat who will scream nonsense at you while he kicks your face in’.  

All those verbal tics characters have? Heavy accents. Law, for instance, never really got the hang of speaking Standard and when he does it - as he usually does in the Grand Line - he does so with a heavy accent that’s a mix of the general North Blue accent and the Flevance-specific one. All of the Minks have accents because of the way their mouths are shaped. ‘Garchu’ is a general greeting and carries a strong sense of community because they can all say it with pretty much the same pronunciation. Bepo lost his accent as a child from trying to sound more like Law, Shachi, and Penguin.

Speaking of Law. He rarely speaks Flevance’s language, but he writes all his notes in it. If people see them, they often assume he’s being paranoid or planning something, so he’s writing in code or something. Really, he’s just trying to make sure this last piece of Flevance doesn’t die before he does.

Big crews with people from lots of different backgrounds, like the Whitebeard Pirates, have to learn each other’s languages in order to communicate, and the crew ends up with a language that’s made up of all their different slang words and figures of speech. You’re really part of the crew when you can communicate fluently in it. Ace isn’t good at picking up new languages - Makino teaching him the proper dialect to be able to thank Shanks for saving Luffy was a nightmare - but the rest of the crew, especially the second division, helps him out where they can. Marco has a pretty heavy accent but he’s fluent in pretty much every language that’s ever come onboard. 

The language of the Celestial Dragons is holy and no one else is allowed to speak it. With the exception of a few slave commands and a handful of employees, no one else is even allowed to understand it (plenty of people pick up on parts of it, of course, but you’d better not let on that you can understand it where they can see you). Doflamingo still speaks it to himself or at other people sometimes, as a ‘fuck you’ to all of them. No one else understands it so no one realizes how he’s forgotten a lot of the grammar rules, how he’s lost the accent and now the words break on his tongue, how he’s never had - never will have - a vocabulary better than a ten year old child. 

Brook’s speech patterns range between ‘posh gentleman’ and ‘your embarrassing grandfather who thinks it’s still normal to say things like ‘groovy’ unironically’. 

Chopper had to learn how to speak human languages from scratch. He can read tons of different languages fluently, but he can’t really speak any but Standard - he can’t get the hang of pronunciation, slang words, or context clues. He’s also not very good at tonal indicators or facial expression cues, since they weren’t things little baby reindeer learn (this is part of why he never realizes when Usopp is lying about things like having 8,000 men - in addition to his naivety, he can’t pick up on the tone shift that Usopp takes on when he starts telling stories). 

Franky, in addition to whatever his biological parents spoke, Standard, and the language of Water Seven, can also speak some of Fishman Island’s language. Iceberg used to speak it better, but these days Iceberg is out of practice because the government doesn’t think much of people speaking it (yay, racism). Franky spoke it with Kokoro when she’d come to visit, and would help Chimney practice it too. 

And while we’re on the subject of Fishman Island, they probably don’t get access to very good education, especially for the lower class citizens (*coughracismagaincough*), so the lower class the citizen the less likely they are to be able to speak Standard well, if at all. This is one of the arguments used for keeping them out of world meetings, to justify enslaving them, and so on - ‘look, they can’t even speak the language’. Those who can speak Standard usually do it with a thick accent, partially because of the education system and partially because of their mouth shapes. 

Koala learned a decent amount of the Celestial Dragon language while a slave, and then the Fishman language from the Sun pirates. The latter is a comfort language; lots more positive associations with it than any other language. She relearns the Celestial Dragon language in the Revolutionary army to help translate things. 

Sabo and Koala have some difficulties at the beginning of their friendship because Sabo’s noble accent and some of the terms are ingrained in him and last past the amnesia and it reminds her too much of the Celestial Dragons and other nobles. He purposefully uses more slang and forces a more casual accent around her. He isn’t sure why he’s so much more comfortable talking like that than he is talking like a gentleman. 

So, yeah, I could go on for about a thousand years because I’m a linguistics nerd, but basically languages and the cultural and social implications thereof are super interesting and I like thinking about them, can you tell.