Learning a people’s language is one of the most important ways to begin to understand their culture–from their history, to their lifestyle, to their outlook on the world. Language is such a vital part of culture that the death of a language is considered a stage of the death of a culture itself, and the revival of a dead language a momentous occasion in the future of a marginalized people. And, for thousands of years, the most direct and devastating attack on a culture has been an attack on its language. When European settlers tried to eradicate American Indigenous cultures, they banned the speaking of their languages. When Han China tried to bring Vietnam and Korea under its heel, they decreed that the conquered people must learn a standardized version of Chinese. And in Ancient Greece, the term “barbarians” was coined to justify xenophobia under the excuse that their languages sounded like nonsense (“bar-bar-bar”) to the Greeks, so they couldn’t possibly be as intelligent.
So when the Traveller writers decided to introduce a sophont species whose language is entirely randomly generated, which they frequently assure the reader can be devoid of meaning, while saying it “according to one humorist, can only be pronounced ‘by an asthmatic dog with severe bronchitis'”(Vargr: Traveller Alien Module 3, 1984, p. 3), “[sounds] like you have a hacking cough” (Vilani & Vargr: The Coreward Races, 1990, p. 87), describing it frequently as “guttural”, “harsh”, and “simple”, I took that personally. As a student and teacher of the language Tolkien called “complex and cacophonous”1 as he shrugged off the idea that Jew-coded characters who spoke a language inspired by Hebrew could ever be heroes, I know viscerally how this lack of care for the language spoken by a fictional culture sets that culture up for a series of racist pitfalls that quickly compound into a caricature of otherness. It’s something entirely different from the choice, made with intent or otherwise, not to provide a fictional language for a fictional culture, or to provide only a handful of italicized words. It is the choice of a linguist, of someone who is passionate about what language can show, of someone who has poured themselves into other fictional languages before and will again, to say that this particular culture is one without deeper meaning.
What aches still worse are the choices Traveller made in creating such a hollow language. As I’ve mentioned, the reasons they provided to ridicule this language are the ones used to ridicule Hebrew and Yiddish, the languages that my family carried through expulsions and progroms. And where they’ve taken the liberty to randomly generate a few words for us, look at the words they’ve bothered with.
This glossary portrays the Vargr as violent, fanatical, supremacist, and cruelly hierarchical. I haven’t even included the other glossaries specifically for weapons and armor! Never has Traveller bothered to provide a list of common names, or of common foods or animals, or even of the commonly derided many names for their homeworld, but thank goodness I know how they differentiate a pistol from an autopistol from an autorifle.
Throughout the works that present the Vargr to the reader, the writers have clearly struggled with the idea that what they have stated clearly is racist is also false. Again and again, like moths about a flame, they say that this culture they present are all violent fanatics or inscrutable and unpredictable, draw back (recognizing the clear racism of the statement) and say that this is the bigoted misconception of nearby humans and that Vargr are people too, and go to describe this misunderstood culture only to circle back to the idea that the misconception must be describing something real and therefore they must be really less-than-human in this way. It’s an infuriating cycle, especially because I believe it draws from a place of genuinely wanting to depict aliens with non-human neurology as equally worthy of personhood. Not knowing how to describe not-human (or more accurately not-neurotypical) without implying less-than-human, they struggle to separate out the assumptions of that implication and write them as clearly false.
By now, some of the 70s and 80s racism has become too dated for even the most egregious editor to allow to see print. We no longer see the Vargr compared to “Orientals” and “Amerinds”, and many of the suggestions made to allow player characters to be properly racist to Vargr characters have been cut out of the sections lifted directly from older sourcebooks into the recent Mongoose Traveller “Aliens of Charted Space” series. (Though the section that suggests that clicks are a linguistic feature too alien to begin to ask humans to pronounce really needs to go the same way.) But that loses what work was put into the Vargr languages and throws away even the idea that the Vargr can be understood, when older sourcebooks clumsily yet enthusiastically asked you to spend a campaign as historians and linguists reconstructing ancient Vargr tales in their nonsense language. Something has been lost, sanded away to sell a false history of Traveller as lazy rather than racist.
I want to do better so badly that it makes my chest hurt. Perhaps it’s the part of me that’s been told I’m less than human myself, or my passionate belief that games can teach us how to approach each other with respect and love, or just my frustration with such obvious racism in the source texts of a game I was genuinely enjoying until I hit that wall. So I sat down to create a conlang for the Vargr that has everything canon ignores. To expand the random generation rules into a consistent phonology and phonotactics, to turn its uncaring gesture in the direction of sentence structure into a real grammar, to coin terms with real understanding of root words and derivation until its lackluster glossary became a vibrant lexicon that spoke of a complex and authentic culture. It’s a work in progress still, but one I’m ready to begin sharing with you, dear Reader, because it lies at the heart of my work on this series. All my work to offer Traveller players a setting where they can explore the world and themes of classic Traveller without being beholden to its ideas about race, eugenics, empire, and government is a macrocosm of my work to turn one racist mockery into a beautiful, intentional, and respectful story.
I don’t know when you’ll see the next installment in this sub-series, but I’ll link it here when I can. Uthe Subsector is still under development and will be either next week or the week after’s post. Thank you for reading.
Edit 3/6: Fixed sources.