This is part nine of a multi-part series exploring how I, Lise, see the drow of D&D. For more info, see part 1’s introduction. Also worth reading is the post where this all started: “On making the drow less problematic.”
Additional note: currently I have limited arm movement due to an injury. Thankfully I wrote a lot of these ahead of time. Please excuse any textual infelicities that may result.
- Introduction + the banality of evil and social Darwinism
- The law of “don’t get caught”
- The ultimate in “guess” culture
- Chosen ones
- Connoisseurs of sensual pleasures
- Sexual orientation
- Gender identity and trans-ness
- Yes, heat vision
- Drow language (you are here)
- Consent in the matriarchy
- No one is born knowing their society is fucked
- Drow cuisine
- Etc etc
Drow, do you speak it, mf-er?
(NB: if I capitalize “Drow,” I mean the drow language, not the people).
Well, first of all, in some sense “Drow” as a language doesn’t exist in D&D 5e. In 5e, Drow was removed as a language PCs can learn. I understand why — it’s part of the simplification of mechanics I mentioned earlier — but it erases a ton of interesting worldbuilding.
And yet there remains a Drow conlang (constructed language).
The canon conlang is very limited. It was first presented to us (I think) by Ed Greenwood in the glossary of Drow of the Underdark 2e. As a nerdy and linguistically-inclined 15-year old, the glossary was my favorite part of the book, too — I spent hours poring over it. It is, if nothing else, a beautiful bit of worldbuilding.
The glossary has been expanded by fans — first in this very old PDF (which of course I have saved to my hard drive; whaddya mean that’s weird?) and secondly on the Chosen of Eilistraee site. The latter even has a “sentence translator” function, which I trust exactly as far as I trust Japanese counter words (i.e. not far at all), because language is more than just gluing words together. Either way, even with the expansions, the conlang is very limited in terms of what sort of sentences you can construct.
A linguist has never taken a look at Drow, and it shows.
As evident in this bit from the PDF:
Look, I’m not a linguist, either, but I consider language learning and linguistics to be one of my Special Interests™️. I have studied many real-world languages to varying degrees of competency. I lived in France for a year, and have looked at many a foreign language dictionary. I also took some linguistic anthropology classes in college.
And I can say for certain that the Drow word zhah (“is”), by itself, is not a word.
… I mean, in literal sense, yes, it is. But it’s only a single conjugation of the verb “to be.” If you look up the word “is” in an English-French dictionary, it will direct you to the verb “to be” (être) instead, because the conjugated form is always subordinate to the infinitive — the form of the verb that starts with “to” in English, eg. to be, to have, to run, etc.
And yet, despite its many official and fan iterations, we don’t have many (any?) Drow infinitives in this conlang. Without infinitives, we have no guidance on how to conjugate verbs. And by extension, we have no way to extrapolate novel verb forms, and we lose the ability to express many ideas.
Basically what I’m saying is the Drow conlang gives us words, but it doesn’t give us the rules to use and expand on those words.
And what is grammar but rules? You need grammar to create novel sentences. The ability to create novel sentences is, according to linguists, what makes a language a language.
I will say, the vocabulary we have from Drow is fantastic, in that it reflects the culture it came from. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there’s no equivalent word for “love” in Drow, because romantic (or even familial) love is poorly defined and rare in Lolthite drow society. “Ssinssrigg,” for “lust” or “sexual desire,” is the closest they get.
… yeah yeah the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is problematic, language isn’t thought, but I think we can all agree that language influences thought or culture, and vice versa.
The adages/sayings from the canonical glossary is fantastic, too. I’d be hard pressed to pick a favorite, but I am fond of: Ulu z’hin maglust dal qu’ellar lueth valsharess zhah ulu z’hin wund lil phalar, or “To walk apart from House and Queen is to walk into the grave.” It expresses the deadliness of drow society, as well as the importance of both the house structure and one’s favor with Lolth.
So what does all this mean? When writing my drow-fancying fic, I do the best I can with what I have (and I definitely don’t use the Chosen of Eilistraee translator). Basically my conlang-ing involves lot of synonyms, compound words, and guessing.
… as well as BLATANTLY IGNORING everything I ever learned in my linguistic anthropology classes. 🤦♀️
And I think I do… all right? I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m proud of my own coining jalbol velkyn zhah naubol, “anything hidden is nothing,” i.e. don’t get caught.
Here’s another example from an in-progress work:
Of course, he let none of his worries show on his face. “Dosst Ilythiiri’s quarth alurin.” Your command of Drow is improving.
“Heir to Ruin,” a forthcoming fic
Was the verb “to improve” in the existing conlang? Of course not. Nor would the existing conlang be likely to give me the present progressive conjugation (“improving”). So I used “(to) better” instead, even though it’s clear from the PDF that “better” is meant to be the adjective/adverb form. Also I ignored that it’s uncommon for the verb and adjective/adverb forms to be the same in a given language. (English is weird and irregular in that way).
To say nothing of the fact that this is conjugated per the dubious grammatical explanation of “is [-ing]” I posted an image of above…
tl;dr: the canonical (and fan-expanded) Drow language has words; it doesn’t have a proper grammar. And if I had my druthers, a degree in linguistics, and an abundance of time on my hands, I’d come up with a real grammar, drastically change how verbs work, and keep a lot of the cool nouns and adages.
Signs, signs, everywhere the signs
As I alluded to in my infravision post — drow also has a sign language, and this hand sign is said to be as expressive as the spoken language. This makes sense — drow have very keen hearing, and they’re often operating in underground places of total silence, where they need to communicate rapidly and accurately without alerting their enemies.
But this, too, has been removed entirely in 5e, and I’m not even sure if Salvatore mentions it in the novels any more.
So, in my drow headcanon, the sign language is still part and parcel of the language. If I’m running a game, Drow would be a separate language PCs can actually learn, and it would come bundled with the hand sign.
Also without hand sign, how can you have the “drow handcode is the Faerunian equivalent of sexting” tag on AO3? 🤣
We’ve had a few light topics in a row, so next time let’s dive back into Drow Being Awful™️, i.e. consent in the matriarchy.
