In this article, we will explore the history of the Common language itself. We will talk about events in the history of the New World Order as needed, but the focus is on the history of the language itself, where it came from, who invented it, how its creator influenced its early development, and how it then developed over time to the present day.

Introduction

First off, as we noted earlier, Common is a constructed language, or conlang, the term the community of language creators used as a general word for a constructed language in the early 21st century when Common was invented. It was invented by amateur language enthusiast Peter. K. Davidson. NWO-sympathetic sources would say just 'linguist', but Davidson had no academic degree in linguistics and in fact nominally worked as an accountant before creating the Common language.

Most of what we know about the history of Common comes from contemporary sources that have made their way to us and from the NWO itself. The NWO mythologises Common. They present Davidson as a wise genius who invented Common, a language of beauty and power that surpasses any natural language, to unite and guide humanity. They intimately link Common with their project to be the sole authority over the earth and the human race. They also promote the language and have created the recognised global authority on what constitutes good Common, 'na Akkatemi na Xafen Zisse' (AXZ), or 'Common Language Academy'.. Therefore, the NWO is in the uncomfortable position for more objective scholars of being both the most authoritative source in the world on Common as well as being highly subjective and untrustworthy.

Complicating matters is the fact that at the time Common was invented and in the immediately following years, no one had an inkling of the bizarre and resounding place Common would occupy in history. Therefore, records of its history and that of personalities associated with it were not considered especially important or interesting at the time and preservation was spotty at best. We are today used to governments and societies in which the most trivial information is readily accessible, sorted by AIs and searchable. In the early 21st century, that process was underway but not yet complete and quite a lot of daily life simply wasn't documented. As well, severe and growing civil unrest and economic collapse interfered with the preservation of records from that time.

We will do the best we can with what we have. This is not an academic article, but academic sources on these matters are available, and those who wish to dive into the history further are encouraged to do so. The work of late 21st century British historian of the New World Order, Michael Lancaster, is particularly recommended.

The history of Common is usually divided as follows:

1. Beginning Period: The time when the language was originally invented, as well as the fictional history of the language created by Davidson as an aid to development. Although Davidson worked on the language long before Hillbillies aired, the show's first air date in 2022 is taken to be the beginning of the language for the purposes of scholars, and the NWO has this as the official year of the language's creation.
2. Early Period: The period where real world use of the language was heavily dominated by fans of the show and development strongly influenced by the language's creator. In the late early period, the language was being used by thousands of people around the world, especially young people, most mainly as hobbyists. Common also had a significant number of speakers, in particular in the Globalist movement, who found it useful as a code. The language changed throughout the early period as it was grown by its creator in cooperation with fans, and the change accelerated in the late early period as the creator's control weakened and many more people used the language. The early period is considered to begin in 2022 and concern what was happening to the language in the real world outside the show.
3. Middle Period: The middle period is commonly considered to start with the death of Davidson in 2031 at the age of 44, which meant the end of an authoritative canonical source to define the language and act as a gatekeeper for its growth. Trends that started in the late early period accelerated and became fully established in the middle period, such as the loss of gender. During the middle period, the Globalist movement was fighting for dominance and the NWO was being established. Common went from a code amongst Globalist revolutionaries in the early part of the period to the established official language of the NWO at the end. Some diversification between dialects and registers began during this period, and a lot of vocabulary borrowing occurred. As well, during the middle period, the first L1 speakers started to appear as many Globalist zealots chose to raise their children in Common, creating the first Common-speaking communities among those who would eventually become the politically-connected elite.
4. Modern Period: The modern period is considered to begin with the decree by the New World Order to adopt Common as its official language in 2045, seeking to unify its extremely diverse elite and avoid fracturing back into warring nation states. Thus began an extensive push to make Common into a language that could run a complex global society, including every technical field, and at the same time to standardise it and reverse the divergence that started to intrude in the early modern period. The AXZ was founded in the Cascadian city of na Purnapi (formerly Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada) under Cascadian linguist from the University of British Columbia, David Chang, who in a very real sense essentially reinvented the language at this time. The modern period is marked by official efforts to promote Common and deprecate other languages. While borrowing was extensively employed in the early part of the period, especially from English, to build a comprehensive technical and scientific vocabulary for Common, in the late part to the present day, the purity and unity of the language is emphasised and there have been efforts to mythologise its origins. The modern period saw Common go from a second language spoken by a few million people (estimates vary wildly) and a handful of young first language speakers to the first language of hundreds of millions of people over multiple generations and the second language of billions.

The beginning period essentially is taken to span no time and to study the set up of the language. The early period lasted only nine years, and the middle period another 14. The middle period is closely associated with the ascendancy of the Globalist movement in key countries around the world and the establishment of the New World Order. The modern period is by far the longest and takes us to the present day.

Influences

The Internet

During the early period, the internet was the most prominent, maybe even the dominant way that people communicated in Common, both as a written medium and in voice communication. During the middle period, the ongoing breakdown in global infrastructure associated with the Global Collapse often interfered with network service, but to the Globalist politicians, activists and revolutionaries who constituted the bulk of the speaker base at this time, it was still the most useful means to coordinate their efforts and still tended to dominate communications, even though the first genuine speaker communities with children raised in the language began to appear during this time.

The impact of the Internet was first to undermine Davidson's control over the language, as communities of users/speakers created innovations like the loss of gender that were picked up and spread. Secondly, though, it acted as a globally unifying force. One used Common with people around the world, and during this time, the online nature of Common tended to cause people to smooth out differences in vocabulary and grammar. Influences came from around the world and tended to spread globally.

In the early modern period, though, Common was established as a daily medium of communication among populations that were often traumatized and displaced and economically disadvantaged, in cities and regions with badly damaged infrastructure and services. These populations primarily used Common in traditional face-to-face and written communication with less of an emphasis on online communication. Common quickly started splitting into local dialects, with marked social registers, and the development of Common in each area reflected local conditions.

As the modern period has progressed, the New World Order has managed to better conditions in most areas and to return the Internet to prominence, especially in urban areas. A mass media in Common has developed. This has caused educated dialects especially to move closer together and to better reflect High Common.

Folk Languages (Naz Wekjas Zisse)

'Folk language' (in Common, 'naz wekjas zisse', literally 'the country languages') is the NWO term (loosely translated) for languages other than Common. The one that has had the most influence by far, obviously, is English. Davidson spoke English as his first language and lived in an English-speaking society. He claimed to have artfully included English influences in Common, but there are surely unconscious influences as well. On top of that, while the fan base was global, the original fans were English-speaking. In the early days , English as a global lingua franca contributed loanword vocabulary to the language. Finally, English was by and large the source for deliberately introduced technical vocabulary in the early modern period.

Influences from a great many other languages can be found in Common, however. For Low Common dialects, local substratum languages are frequent and prolific sources of new vocabulary. In High Common, a significant number of late early period and middle period borrowings came from other large world languages besides English - essentially, whatever the speaker community picked up on. Words from Low Common have made their way into local varieties of High Common and occasionally they have gotten picked up globally, This happens even today, even with efforts underway to promote the unity and purity of Common.

It should also be said that Common has influenced other languages in the last century - it has become common for words from Common to creep into languages it is in contact with. This trend of vocabulary and idioms from Common making their way into languages in contact with it (which is practically every language on earth today) has been a notable and growing trend. It may be that in the later modern period, there has been more influence by Common on substratum languages than the other way around.

L2 Speakers

During the early period, Common had virtually no native speakers, and during the middle period, when it was starting to acquire its first native speakers, most speakers were still second language speakers. Today there are over 800 million first language speakers of Common, but the number of first language (L1) speakers is still dwarfed by the number of second language (L2) speakers.

The impact of this has been that the development of the language has deviated from the normal expectations one would have of a native speaker community right through to the middle modern period, as L2 speakers do not necessarily behave in a completely unconscious and systematic way with the language, and there are many opportunities for incursions from speakers' native languages into Common, which particularly influences Low Common dialects and local varieties of High Common.

Beginning Period

Common was invented for an early 21st century American screenshow (at the time, the term would have been 'television show' or 'TV show') called Hillbillies. The word 'hillbillies' is an American English term roughly meaning ignorant country people. Hillbillies was about a small, isolated society that had lived in a commune away from the influence of modern society for generations before some calamity forced them to abandon their way of life and show up on the doorstep of the modern world. For the purposes of the show, the hillbillies spoke English, and the moderns spoke Common.

Hillbillies was a modest hit that developed a cult following and went on for four series over four years, from 2022-2026 (actually, as an American show, they would have said it went on for four 'seasons', and a typical season could have over twenty episodes, as a series for an American show usually produced many more episodes than a series of a typical British show at the time). It streamed over the old Netflix streaming platform, with episodes released weekly instead of seasons being published all at once. It became an unusually popular global success, with subtitled and dubbed translations into over a dozen languages.

The 'showrunner' (ultimate creative authority) for Hillbillies, a man named Marvin Crandall, had a creative vision for the series that involved some dialogue in the Common language to enforce the sense of alienation that the main characters felt at being introduced into the modern society. It was decided that either the moderns or the hillbillies had to speak English for the logistics of the show. The hillbillies were the main characters, trying to maintain some semblance of their simple communal life while embedded in a very different modern culture, and had the most lines of dialogue, so it was decided that they would be the ones whose language was represented by English. However, the show wasn't supposed to be explicitly set in America or anywhere else, The show was intended to be a science fiction fantasy rather than alternative future history, so the aesthetic choice was made that Common should be an a priori language and not sound exactly like any natural language.

The producers suggested to Crandall to try and get the famous conlanger David J. Peterson to invent the Common language. Peterson had invented languages for numerous successful fantasy and science fiction shows and was well known and respected in the American entertainment industry for this type of work. However, at the time Peterson was busy with a number of other projects, most notably the Neo-Orcish language for the Lord of the Rings sequels and declined (or so the story goes). One of the producers suggested to Crandall that he try asking the producer's cousin, Peter K. Davidson, an amateur linguist and conlang hobbyist, if he could do it. Davidson was working as an accountant, but his partner was a successful Hollywood film studio executive, who was known to Crandall. Crandall connected with Davidson via Davidson's partner.

Davidson was well-off due to his husband's affluence and didn't really need to work, so he was in a position to take on the project. He was an enthusiastic amateur linguist who by all accounts spoke Spanish, Mandarin and Russian fluently in addition to English. He claimed to have created elaborate personal conlangs before taking on Common, but he was known to embellish, especially in his later years. No record of his other work has survived. What is known is that he was an active conlanging hobbyist, which is what led to him ultimately being suggested to Crandall. Crandall knew what he wanted aesthetically and artistically but was not interested in the technical details. Perhaps fooled by the similarity in names, Crandall decided that Davidson would likely be just as good as Peterson for his purposes and hired him.

Davidson wrote that he explicitly did not want to create an auxiliary language like Esperanto, but that he envisioned it as a natural language with complexity, a history and quirks. He wanted to give it an alien quality while at the same time not posing excessive difficulty for the actors. Finally, although the language was not supposed to be based on English ('not based on English' was was an explicit base-level instruction from Crandall), Davidson felt that as a global, modernistic language, English was a perfect inspiration. Therefore, rather than avoiding some features if they had an English quality, Davidson said later that he deliberately incorporated some ideas that reminded him of English, as an homage. For example, the idea of articles and auxiliary verbs as mandatory grammatically-competent particles, he said, was inspired by English, as was some of the allophony inspired by patterns in Old English. He made other decisions, however, such as a the case system and verbal valence agreement, as a deliberate departure from the languages that he spoke.

Protolanguage and Fictional History of Common

Peter Davidson created an in-universe fictional history of Common for Hillbillies. It is important to understand this background in order to understand some of the patterns we see in real-world Common.

According to Davidson, in order to create a naturalistic effect, he created a protolanguage for Common and a fictional history to explain the development of his Common from that language. Today we somewhat confusingly call the language of Hillbillies Old Common, and the putative ancestor we call Proto-Common. We only have Davidson's claim to go on that he conducted his development work in this way, and scholars of Common are divided as to whether the language shows the hallmarks of this kind of systematic derivation from an ancestor or not, i.e., how naturalistic it really is, or how extensive such a protolanguage might have been, if it really existed. Certainly no record of it survives to the present day. Davidson talked about it but refused to release any notes about his creative process when he was alive and whatever notes there were were not preserved and disappeared when he died.

However, Davidson claims that the protolanguage had a nominative-accusative alignment and a more extensive case system than Old Common, as well as a system of high-low vowel harmony. According to Davidson, inflectional endings on nouns had a high or low vowel depending on abstract or concrete gender, and this caused the stressed syllable vowel to be high or low in harmony with the ending. The language had ergativity in the past tense only, as we see in some natural languages. Somewhere in the distant past, the main speaker community went through a massive upheaval and a period of foreign domination, bringing in a host of foreign loanwords and causing a major reorganization of the sound system and grammar (a deliberate parallel with English).

The effect was to wear the inflectional endings off nouns and verbs, and series of determiners to evolve from various existing pronouns and verbs with new declensional and conjugational paradigms. The ergativity of the past tense took over the whole language because of the way the verb conjugations evolved, causing Common to change from nominative-accusative to ergative-absolutive.alignment. The nominative case became a prepositional case but was still called the nominative. Other cases other than the dative were lost, and the dative and nominative wound up having to do a lot of grammatical work. Because of the mandatory use of determiners for nouns and verbs and loss of inflection on the words themselves, zero derivation between nouns and verbs became rampant and the two collapsed into the modern grammatical category of terms. Verbs acquired gender, often driven by nothing else other than phonology, and verbal auxiliaries had to agree with the main verb in gender.

The original genders of common were the concrete (usually characterised by a low vowel, e, a or o, as the nucleus of the main stressed syllable) and the abstract (usually characterised by a high vowel, i, y, or u, as the nucleus of the main stressed syllable). These genders were used on the show and survived into the early history of the language's real world adoption. While the gender system is not used today, we see its remnants in the modern definite/indefinite distinction in nouns, the modern form of the realis/irrealis distinction, and many vocabulary items showing the low vowel/high vowel pattern.

Phonology and Orthography

Davidson's idea with phonology was that it had to be easy for the actors, and himself, to pronounce, but it should sound foreign to English speakers, and it should seem a little bit alien. To that end, Davison decided there would be no series of opposed voiced and unvoiced consonants like in English or aspirated and unaspirated as in Chinese, etc., but that there would be one series of stops, fricative and affricates which would be unvoiced by default and which would be voiced allophonically in certain environments. He wanted to make extensive use of allophony.

Originally, one decision he made was to not have the sound [m] as a phoneme (it would appear as an allophone of [n]). This is why in very old, core words of Common, you generally do not see the letter m, despite it being one of the most common sounds found in all the world's languages, nearly universal, in fact. Davidson had second thoughts about the decision to exclude m early on in the series and reversed himself in season 1, meaning that old words do show up with the letter m, but you don't see it in vocabulary like grammatical particles that go right to the original invention of the language.

He said he wanted to create a relatively balanced phonology which was not optimally simple, but not so complex as to pose much challenge for actors. He allowed some consonant clusters in syllable onsets and created a six vowel system with only two diphthongs. Whether he was trying to keep things easy as he said or merely being lazy, he chose basically default IPA sounds for his phonemes, making phonemic transcriptions and romanizations often resemble each other quite a lot. He decided on a 'continental' sound for stop consonants, explicitly stating that actors should avoid the English pattern of aspirating certain initial stops, and that the t/d sounds would be dental as in French or Spanish and not alveolar as in English.

Originally, Davidson created a phonemic alphabet of 21 special glyphs that were used to write the language on the show. He also created a romanization which was used to coach actors in their lines and tried to represent words in a way English-speaking actors would find phonetic - for example, a phrase like 'We nox triju', 'I see', would be rendered something like 'Way noesh TREEyoo'.

Neither of these scripts has survived to the present day. Early on, Davidson devised a script where each of the letters in the special native alphabet was replaced one-for-one with a letter from the Roman alphabet. He used this script to write text for signage and writing in the show to pass to the art department to convert to glyphs, and later to create accessible materials for fans that preserved the feel of the language while being convenient to read and write on keyboards. This is the script that has come down to us in the present day, practically in its original form, except for conventions of punctuation and capitalisation that evolved over time and were heavily influenced by English.

A common early criticism of Common that has persisted with critics to the present day was that Common looks and sounds ugly. This apparently didn't put off fans, who could be found to defend Common's odd look and sound as somehow distinctive or endearing.

Vocabulary

The original language was intentionally different from English and other natural languages, both lexically and grammatically, other than sly homages here and there, and the occasional copying of natural language that may have been unintentional. Loanwords started to rapidly enter the language after it began to be used outside the world of Hillbillies, but were not permitted in the original canonical language created for the show, and were assiduously avoided by earliest fans using the language. It was not until the fan base broadened and Common began to transition from an object of cult following to a real medium of communication that the language started changing in ways that its creator did not sanction and loanwords started entering the language in large numbers.

Many languages designed for international communications have deliberately compact vocabularies for ease of learning. Common was not intended for this purpose, and Davidson imagined it as a language with a relatively large vocabulary and many synonyms and near-synonyms. However, he only created a small vocabulary out of practicality, essentially whatever the show needed and whatever he and the shows fans created together. This worked out to a relatively compact vocabulary, and actual use of the language has looked a lot more like working with a language with a compact design than a sprawling language like English. However, given that there was no ideological impetus to keep Common minimal and that after Davidson died there was no authority to guide or stop the language's growth, the overall trajectory of Common has been one of growth in the size of the vocabulary. Items have fallen into disuse as well, but the addition of new vocabulary from coining and borrowing is the dominant trend.

Grammar

The grammar of Common has survived to the modern day remarkably intact for a language that has gone through such tumultuous history. Of course, there are numerous examples of dialects and registers of Common with significant shifts in pronunciation, lexicon and grammar from standard High Common, but the High Common language itself is influential, prestigious and very widely spoken today. There were a couple of major grammatical differences between Old Common and High Common that you will notice, however.

One is that Old Common had a system of gender, as noted above, that began to collapse in the late early period.and was completely gone by the end of the middle period. By the time standardisation efforts began in earnest in the modern period, the version of Common with loss of gender and attendant shifts in the interpretation of gender-agreeing determiners was accepted as proper Common and codified.

Another is that Old Common, like Spanish, lacked a grammatical device to ask yes/no questions and depended on intonation. This intonation was never explicitly defined, as Davidson didn't really think to define it, and so a very English intonation pattern developed among actors on the show and early fans. WH type questions (questions with words like 'what' and 'who') used the particle 'ko' as the determiner for the uncertain actor in the sentence and its presence usually signalled a question, but it showed no special placement in the sentence.

Modern Common borrowed English and Western European idioms around questions wholesale and apparently unconsciously. To ask a yes/no question, in addition to intonation, Common speakers often front the verb.phase (the entire phrase, though, not just one element like the determiner). To ask a WH question, the element with the ko determiner is often fronted.

Davidson overall chose grammatical features that he thought were distinctive, unusual and alien as long as he felt they would pose no trouble to him writing dialogue for the show on demand and in a way that wouldn't get him pointed out for inconsistencies later (in other words, he had to understand it well enough himself to not make mistakes). He very consciously chose Common's determiner-head term bracketing structure and verbal valance agreement as the language's 'central gadgets'. He's on record as saying that every language has one or a few characteristic 'gadgets' it likes to use, and these are Common's. He said he felt he had the most creative freedom in the grammar department, because he was much less worried that actors wouldn't be able to parse the grammar than that they would have trouble pronouncing something - they really didn't have to understand what they were saying at all. Given how strange the resulting product was, it is actually quite remarkable how much of this system has survived to the present day without major changes.

Early Period Background

The early period is considered to have started when the Hillbillies show first aired with dialogue in Common in 2022. Although our focus is the history of the language, some context for what was happening in the world at that time is needed to understand why the language took off in the way it did.

The Global Financial Collapse is something that today we tend to think of as starting with the US government debt default of 2025, early during the first term of President Donald Trump Jr. However, what is often overlooked is that the Collapse did not occur out of the blue but as the culmination of years of steadily worsening economic conditions, periodic stock market crashes and price shocks, and the steady breakdown of the 20th century American international order that had prevailed since World War II. The global financial system had over seventy-five years of trust built into it, and it turned out that this faith in the value of the United States dollar, the dominant global reserve currency at the time, was surprisingly robust. Looking into the abyss that loss of trust in the US dollar, the Federal Reserve, and the US Treasury would entail, for a long time investors sought reasons to believe that the worst could not happen. This sentiment stabilised the financial system.

In 2022, America was over a year into the second term of President Donald Trump Sr. The country was still recovering from the stock market crash of 2020, and the war with Iran was stuck in a grinding stalemate, with little or no oil tankers willing to attempt to bring oil from the Persian Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz. The President's death in office under suspicious circumstances and the short presidency of Vice President Hannity would not happen until close to Christmas that year.

So there was an energy crisis, a war which was going poorly, and a bad economy. Trump had spent the last six years attacking the old American international order, defunding the United Nations, and undermining the NATO military alliance. He cancelled the NAFTA trade agreement with Canada and Mexico in a fit of pique after making a big show of 'renegotiating' it, which in turn devastated the economies of those countries and seriously harmed the United States' economy, and he started trade wars with numerous other countries. Indeed, the Trump administration drew ever closer to former rival Russia, but experienced volatile relations with even that power due to Trump's increasingly bizarre and erratic policies and public behaviour. Trump was a weak and mercurial leader with no patience for details and given to act on pure impulse and spite, and via the old Twitter social media platform, he had an unfiltered line of communication to the globe to express every ill-judged thought that went through his head whilst sitting on the toilet.

Trump won the 2020 election with an even smaller minority of the popular vote than in 2016, based on a quirk of the US electoral system called the Electoral College that permitted such outcomes. There were open accusations by Democratic party leaders of vote rigging in favour of Trump in Republican-controlled states. His inauguration day on Jan. 20, 2021 was met with violent street protests in Washington, DC and heavy security. Dozens of people died in the harsh crackdown against dissent, and hundreds were arrested and held indefinitely without charge, a common practise today but still very shocking in the America of the time. Subsequent to this, Trump's Department of Justice opened investigations against dozens of rivals of the Trump regime in both the Democratic and Republican parties, and opponents were jailed, including 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and 2020 opponent Joe Biden. Clinton herself was never released, remaining a bogeyman of the regime, and was eventually ordered executed for treason by Trump Jr. in 2031 at the age of 84. Faith in America's democratic institutions and founding ideals had never been weaker.

Trump was supported by a mass movement that called itself the 'alt-right', or 'alternative right wing', a movement related to but distinct from the general conservative movement embodied in the Republican party. The conservative movement had been working to undermine trust in public institutions and achieve permanent power since at least the 1970s and by the early 21st century was mostly on the ascendant, but they still faced tough opposition from liberal forces embodied in the Democratic party. They and the Democrats shared some fundamental agreements, though, such as general support for the American-led international system. This alt-right movement, by contrast, while international in scope, was ardently nationalist, anti-globalist and white supremacist in ideology.

This is key to understanding what followed. The world appeared to be unravelling and the people who became the Globalist movement blamed the anti-globalist alt-right and the conservative movement that it eventually subsumed. By attacking globalism, the alt-right called attention to the concept of globalism in contrast to their own extreme nationalism, and to some people, Globalism looked pretty good in comparison. This opposition faction adopted the Globalist label proudly and a movement was born. The were aided by prominent Globalist intellectuals like the American-Cascadian academic Sandra Gutiérrez, writer of the original Globalist Manifesto, who developed Globalism into a coherent doctrine.

Middle class young people living in rich countries at that time, who had been born and raised in the 1990s and 2000s, had grown up as possibly the most affluent and coddled generation in all of human history. Many grew up wanting for nothing, with the bedrock expectation of prosperity, security and structure.

What they got in the late 2010s and 2020s was anything but. Most were far worse off than their parents. The stagnant economy offered them few opportunities. They were angry and disappointed, newly poor, and deeply frustrated. In the Trump era, they were ripe for joining mass movements. Many movements flourished in that time, bringing violence and chaos that further undermined the national and global order and causing still more discontent, in a positive feedback loop. In America, alt-right and white supremacist groups flourished, as did radical left, libertarian, communist, and anarchist movements. Religious movements also flourished. Radical Islam continued its strong run from earlier in the century, and radical, extremely violent Christian groups became commonplace in the United States, Eastern Europe, and Africa

What these groups tended to have in common was a tendency to denounce and try to destroy the American and global order, some in the guise of 'saving' it, others just out of naked spite or a sense of grievance against it.

It was in this cauldron that Globalism formed. A number of respected leaders, such as Bill Gates, an American software tycoon and philanthropist, decried the overthrow of the global order as destructive to global peace and security, inimical to efforts to combat the threat of global warming, and ultimately destructive of human prosperity and life. They pleaded for racial and religious tolerance, democracy and the rule of law, and international law and commerce. Seeing the attacks on 'globalism' as an existential threat to humanity, many of them decided to own the label and forcefully defend Globalism as the best means to ensure human prosperity and survival. These leaders were heroes and inspirations to the grassroots Globalists, and were instrumental in the fact that Globalism was always dominated by its capitalist and technophilic wing.

The Globalist message resonated with many young people at the time, at least those who did not fall to the allure of other mass movements. They were told a story of Globalism as a golden age ideology dating from the end of World War II, which was betrayed by racialists and nationalists and attacked by misguided leftists. They sought to bring back the golden age of their youth by restoring global order. But not necessarily American order. Many felt that the election of the Trump dynasty and overall collapse of American civic order proved the weakness and failure of the American constitutional system, and that the fatal flaw of the post-World War II international order was precisely the 'national' part. They developed a radical vision of the end of nation states and national sovereignty, and a notion of rights that did not include any kind of right to national, racial or tribal identity or self-determination.

However, completely recognizable, normal daily life persisted well into the disruptions of the 2020s, and this was the backdrop in which Hillbillies was released. The show was critically acclaimed and popular. In particular, Globalist youth found a resonance with the show's story of an ignorant communal tribe (the English-speaking people, as it happens), encountering a stable, prosperous, advanced society (speaking Common). The modern society of Hillbillies represented to many the goal of a stable, prosperous global society that the Globalists aspired to and the hillbillies themselves Americans as they were in the 2020s, fractious,insular and self-destructive.

As with many screenshows featuring a constructed language at the time, fans became fascinated with the language, devouring material on the language and doing their best to communicate in it. Common did uncommonly well in this regard, as there was a minor fad of teenagers and young adults learning the language, some of whom became very proficient. There was a very active and engaged fan base just for the language itself. This was not deeply unusual for fan culture at the time. What was a little different was that members of the Globalist movement had a large overlap with this community, and such individuals started to find Common a useful way to disguise communications from casual eavesdropping in their competition with other factions and in run-ins with the authorities.

Early Period Development

During the first four years of the early period, the development of Common occurred mostly through Davidson's development of the language to generate dialogue for Hillbillies. However, he and the show's producers noticed early on that a devoted fan base was developing and in particular there was a level of interest in the Common language created for the show not seen for a created language since the Dothraki language created for Game of Thrones over a decade earlier. That that language had surely been of much better quality overall did not seem to play in the relative levels of interest. Davidson was very engaged with the fan base, frequently interacting with fans on social media and occasionally using fan-created words in the show. By 2025, there was a 'Living Language Common' book you could buy and many other official and unofficial sources and materials.

Even after the show ended, interest persisted and Davidson continued to be engaged with the community of enthusiasts. Davidson was a genuinely effective leader in this community, acting as a gatekeeper for 'canon' in the growth of the language and remaining engaged with fans. He no longer worked as an accountant after the show started to air and lived on the proceeds of his work on Hillbillies and on the sale of materials to promote Common, supported by his wealthy older husband. By all accounts, Davidson was a friendly and gregarious man who enjoyed the interaction and attention that the language brought him. This influence may have been instrumental in preventing Common from becoming just another forgotten relic of early 21st century popular culture, by nurturing a strong fan base after the show ended and continuing to build the language.

However, Davidson's death may have been as important as his life to the future growth and status of Common. Davidson was killed in 2031 at the age of 44, during civil unrest. The New World Order likes to say that Davidson died leading a pro-Globalist protest, but it is more likely he was participating in one of Los Angeles' frequent anti-government and/or food riots, or just got caught up at the wrong place at the wrong time. Conditions at the time were such that it was at least six months before anyone in the Common community knew for sure that he was dead. His husband, who was over 20 years Davidson's senior, died not long after. The couple's home is said to have burned down during the riots - regardless, none of Davidson's personal notes survived to the present day, all we have are preserved communications with others and his public records. Davidson's death is considered to mark the end of the Early Period.

During the early period, Common was essentially the properly of Davidson and his fan base, but was also widely used as a sort of code talk amongst an online and real life community of young people that became global in scope, even acting as a replacement for English for international communication in some cases. It was particularly popular amongst Globalists. Common's highly pro-drop grammar, where syntactic actors and key content words like head terms could be readily dropped while preserving a lot of syntactic information was widely touted by enthusiasts as an advantage which allowed in-groups to be both very precise and very cryptic at the same time. The idea of this advantage was surely exaggerated. However, many people believed it, and it influenced the acceptance of a very pro-drop style into modern High Common.

Most of the changes that characterise High Common could be seen starting in the Early Common period, but in this period the language mostly grew in a planned way and was relatively resistant to organic change. The language was also highly united in this period without much in the way of dialectal variation or different social registers.

During the Early Period, the following differences from High Common can be noted:

1. The gender system was preserved and there was no definite and indefinite distinction in nouns

Take the words 'triju' (sight) and 'zeul' (eye) in modern High Common, These are old words originally coined by Davidson and firmly within the gender system. Looking at them as nouns, in High Common you could say:

• Na triju: The sight
• Ny triju: A sight
• Na zeul: The eye
• Ny zeul: An eye

In the Old Common of Davidson, you would have to say:

• Ny triju: The/a sight
• Na zeul: The/an eye

Triju belongs to the abstract gender and zeul belongs to the concrete gender, so the articles would have to agree with them in gender. There was no definite/indefinite distinction. The existence of this system led to a number of new coinings that depended on this pattern - where fans would create a new word by taking an existing word and changing its gender, with the idea that they were creating a more concrete or abstract concept. Because of the pattern this left in the language, we see speakers occasionally coining new words based on this pattern right up to the present day. However, the gender system was starting to break down even by the late early period.

2. The irrealis mood used a special suffix and verbs also had gender

Take the word 'zeul' again, but this time with its verbal meaning of 'look'. It is a transitive skurun verb taking te as its auxiliary in High Common just as it was in Old Common. In the non-past imperfect, it looks like this in High Common:

• Realis: te zeul
• Irrealis: ti zeul

In Old Common, however, the irrealis was expressed with the suffix -cir:

• Realis: te zeul
• Irrealis: tecir zeul

You would never use ti with zeul, because zeul was of the concrete gender even when used as a verb, and the verbal auxiliary had to agree with the verb in gender. Ti was the auxiliary for abstract skurun verbs.

Gender, as an aside, could be somewhat arbitrary, and Davidson said this was by design. 'Skurun' itself, 'to hit', despite seeming to be a pretty concrete concept, was in the abstract gender, and Davidson said this was because in the language's fictional history it started out as a verb and when it became a term and assumed a gender, it got assigned a gender based on its phonology (stressed syllable with a high vowel) rather than based on meaning.

The change to using the concrete forms of auxiliaries for the realis mood and the abstract for the irrealis was an important step in the language's loss of gender.

3. Possession was different

Davidson originally created Common for a society in which there was not a lot of weight on personal possession. As such, he decided to create a round-about way to express possession via a dative construction. So, to say 'the child's dog', you would write:

Na paluh su ija pocuk nox.
The(NOM) dog that(ABS) the(DAT) child go(NP,IM)

This means 'the child's dog, or more literally, 'the dog that to the child goes'. The head term is omitted from the semitransitive auxiliary 'nox'. A head term that clarifies the type of relationship could be added, or just 'noxaj', 'to go'.

However, Common was picked up by a society that cared about personal possession a heck of a lot, and still does, and found the dative construction wordy for something they commonly wanted to express. Early Common speakers came up with some workarounds that were never official but which were widely used and even crept into the show. One was adposition - for personal names especially, placing the possessor as a modifying term to the head term possessee was commonly taken to be an idiom for possession. For example, the above could be rendered:

Na pocuk paluh.
The(NOM) child dog.

The problem with this construction was that it was dependent on context and could be misread - the above could be read as a way of saying puppy, for example, or 'dog that is like a child to me'. Something like 'Na Toni paluh' for Tony's dog would be more clear, as a personal name would be more likely to be interpreted as possessive in this construction. As well, there was no way to use a pronoun this way, as in 'his dog'. This led to the third way of making a possessive, using the minimal-meaning, associative preposition 'y' and having the possessor as the object of y in the nominative case. So you could say:

Na paluh y na pocuk.
The(NOM) dog of the(NOM) child

In modern High Common, 'y' is completely reduced and almost never spoken or written. So a more modern rendering would be:

Na paluh na pocuk.

In this way the modern nominative case has developed somewhat of a genitive quality. If you wanted to say his dog or her dog, you could say 'na paluh na' or to make the 'his' more emphatic, 'na paluh na yn'.

All three of these modes of possession are active in High Common, with the original possessive understood to be the most alienable and the adposition type the least alienable possession (although this is a fuzzy distinction in Common). The dative possessive might be used to deliberately point out something possessed weakly, such as something held but not owned.

4. The preposition 'y' was not reduced to ∅

Modern Common grammarians consider 'y' to still be a word of Common that is reduced to ∅ (i.e, nothing) in most situations, sort of a null preposition. It is an almost contentless preposition that just implies association, somewhat like 'of' in English. In Old Common, people often wrote and said 'y', but contemporary accounts exist decrying the slang usage of dropping the 'y' as well as a number of attested instances of the drop in writing, so we know this process started early.

5. There was no special way to form questions

In High Common, heavily influenced by English and other Western European languages, a yes/no question is implied by fronting the verb (not one part of the verb, but the whole verb, from determiner to head term), and a WH- word question is implied by fronting the uncertain element marked with the determiner 'ko' ('what'). In Old Common, questions were formed by intonation only, or for yes/no questions by tagging with a negative or positive particle associated with the verb (this method is still seen in High Common). Common has relatively free phrase order and case marking, so it isn't definite that fronting such an element means it is a question, and Common also tends to front topics, but it is a general pattern. This change started appearing more or less unconsciously in the early period and accelerated in the middle period.

6. Politesse/respectful terms and commands were not as developed

Modern High Common has a lot of terms of respect and deference, typically special head terms and modifiers, and these are instrumental in giving suggestions or commands. It also has a lot of terms of subordination or abuse. Old Common came from a much more egalitarian mindset, so if you wanted to tell someone, even a social superior, to look at something you might just say 'ju te zeul', which would be a very familiar way to address someone, usually insultingly so, for modern speakers.

7. Very few loanwords

Under Davidson's influence, the fan community tried to maintain the faithfulness of Common to the universe of Hillbilllies and they worked to avoid the incursion of loanwords from English and other languages into Common. However, people were much less conscious of when they were calquing an expression from their first language, and a number of new vocabulary items entered Common as calques. As well, the language was seeing real-world use both by bored teenagers and by activists, especially globalist activists, as a code language. Those users also tended to avoid loans in order to remain obscure, but they were not ideologically committed to the purity of the language, and did add new, unofficial vocabulary for their own use, some of which eventually became established in the language. Davidson worked hard to help the community coin new terms, even some technical and scientific vocabulary. Some of this technical vocabulary was replaced with loans during the middle and modern periods, but some has persisted to the present day.

Middle Period

The middle period is considered to start with the death of Peter K. Davidson in 2031 and end with the official decree of the New World Order establishing Common as its official language in 2045. Most of this time was firmly in the depths of the Global Collapse. A dizzying amount of social, political and economic change and upheaval occurred in this short, fourteen year period, and a massive, massive amount of death and destruction (hundreds of millions of people around the world died of violence, disease or starvation during this time, but that would be nothing compared to the horrors of the early modern period) that left the whole world severely traumatized for generations to come, arguably to the present day. During the middle period, Common had no recognised sponsor and no official backing, and was the property of a community of speakers and writers 'in the wild' who mostly used it for practical, coded communication. The awareness of the language's origins in entertainment lessened, and the importance of the Hillbillies show and the fan base faded.

By the middle period the idea that 'life goes on' was no longer true. The entertainment industry largely collapsed, and hobbies based on popular entertainment were the least of most people's worries. During this period, the financial crisis and US government debt default had destroyed the world's confidence in the United States dollar and the 'full faith and credit' of the US Government, as they used to say. In the United States and Canada, right wing governments had weakened or eliminated the social safety net and crippled governments' ability to raise taxes in order to prevent its reinstatement. With the debt default, the government couldn't raise money by issuing debt, and Donald Trump Jr.'s order to the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy by simply printing trillions of dollars just led to hyperinflation of the world's reserve currency.

This situation was exacerbated by the existence of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which, while not exactly stable, were not losing value and were seen as safe stores of value. Attempts to criminalize their use made little dent. The authority of national governments became increasingly tenuous, and with the amount of weaponry floating around, this was a dangerous situation. To top it off, there were a number of new nuclear powers that arose in reaction to the withdrawal of the American security guarantee, including South Korea, Japan and Canada.

The conservatives and Trumpists, ironically, had empowered local governments to some degree through the simple expedient of creating a power vacuum, and this is where authority began to coalesce. Breakaway countries began to appear as Canada, the United States and Mexico dissolved. The first to go were Cascadia and Quebec, the former of which became the lynchpin of the New World Order and the latter of which (which managed to leave with a share of Canada's nuclear weapons) remains a noncompliant state outside the Order's control today. Cascadia, of course, became the first new country to ignore the old international order's borders, a testament to the weakness of the international order at that time. Cascadia (capital Victoria, or as we say nowadays, na Fiktórija) started as a union of coastal Washington State in the US and British Columbia's Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland in Canada. It managed to stabilise under a Globalist government and by using a government-issued cryptocurrency, and it became aggressively expansionist, spreading from Alaska to Baja California and right through the western mountains.

The New World Order formed against a backdrop of an international alliance of Globalist movements fighting to take control of their respective countries, or in the case of North America, whatever they could grab, while droughts, wars and civil unrest caused massive food and medicine shortages. Increasingly vicious political violence abounded. The original NWO consisted of Cascadia, South China, Turkey, Russia and the North European Union (basically, Germany and France, which soon split into the two NWO states of na Fyransy and na Tuslan), and that was enough to slowly consolidate the rest of the world under their sway, by persuasion, subversion or violence. The NWO's policy of deliberate, massive population movements started to sweep away the recognizable ethnic nation states that dominated the world in the early 21st century and has produced the very mixed societies we know today.

These are the major developments of Common during this period:

1. Loss of gender and change to the irrealis

These went together. The first change was that some casual speakers and writers, finding the irrealis suffix bulky, started using abstract agreement for the irrealis and concrete agreement for the realis and stopped performing gender agreement for verbs altogether. This idiom was attested even in the early period but deprecated, but in the middle period after Davidson's death, it quickly took over. This led to the second innovation in North America and Western Europe of using the concrete/abstract distinction for a definite/indefinite distinction in nouns. This change was slower to catch on, being more specific to regions where the main substratum language had this distinction and speakers felt the need for it. It slowly took over but wasn't made official until after 2045 in the early modern period. Gender in nouns did persist in some local dialects for decades after.

2. Reduction of preposition 'y', adoption of new possessives, and fronting in questions

These trends noted above were well on their way in the early period and took over completely in the middle period.

3. Division into dialects and registers, and development of polite address first seen

In the middle period, without the devotion to the screenshow or a living creator as unifying influences, regional variations started to be noted. Different social registers were less common until the modern period, but casual and formal registers began to be seen. While nowhere near the development of modern High Common, modes of polite address began to take hold. Globalists were still relatively egalitarian amongst themselves, and so encoding social stratification in language was less fashionable. Taming this dialectal division became a prime preoccupation amongst the language's gatekeepers at the beginning of the modern period, although in fact it accelerated. Some of the modern varieties of the language can trace back to this period.

One mitigating factor, however, was the fact that the community of writers and speakers often interacted virtually over the internet during this period, as unreliable as it was, and the highly distributed and interactive nature of the speaker base did tend to act as a unifying factor that slowed dialectal division.

4. Borrowing

During this time, borrowing loanwords from other languages, and calquing, became rampant. Common was heavily influenced by the languages it was in contact with during the middle period. A lot of words having to do with unpleasant topics that Davidson and his followers tended to avoid entered the language at this time due to practical usefulness. An example is 'torcy', borrowed from the English word 'torture'. Borrowings during this period tended to be as a result of organic language contact and need and not as a result of effort and planning. They also tended to disseminate widely because of the heavy online share of usage of the language.

By the way, when observing loans from English, you might observe some patterns that seem strange at first blush. For example, why 'torcy' and not 'tocy' from 'torture'? The reason is that of the English speaking countries, only Britain did not wind up under the rule of the New World Order. Hence British English had almost no influence on Common. Australian and New Zealand English have some qualities in common with standard British English, such as non-rhoticism, but their relatively small populations were swamped by North America, which is a very distinct dialect region with mostly rhotic dialects, and where important NWO states like na Kaskétija, na Kanata, na Xykako, na Epekwit and na Nuják are located. Borrowers sometimes did simplify difficult English phonology by deleting r's (for example, see na Nuják from New York!), but loanwords from English will generally show an unmistakably North American quality.

Modern Period

The modern period is said to begin in 2045, with the declaration of the recently established New World Order that its official language would be Common. At the time it was not clear whether that would stick, whether English would be ascendant, or even whether a competitor like Esperanto might get a look in. The modern period spans a great length of time compared to the two earlier periods, and a lot happened during that time. However, several trends mostly characterise the development of Common during this time:

1. Adoption of Common picked up rapidly, reinforced by the 'Uxáfen', or 'Commonisation' policy and movement. Once established, a new and insecure NWO found it very useful, and the trend was self-reinforcing.
2. The unparalleled horror and death of the Middle East War killed hundreds of millions of people in the space of a few weeks in 2047, and the New World Order mission to project power into southern and western Asia to provide aid and extend control created the New World Army, brought soldiers into contact from across the Order who used Common as their lingua franca in the field, and massively accelerated the movement of populations.
3. Common deliberately borrowed an enormous amount of vocabulary from other languages during this period, mostly English and mostly technical vocabulary, in a deliberate play to supplant English as the dominant scientific and technical language. It was felt it needed to be done quickly and be relatively accessible to experts, so borrowing was judged to be the route of expedience. Teams of experts were tasked with this, under David Chang's na Akkatemi na Xafen Zisse (AXZ).
4. Common became codified under the AXZ and ongoing efforts were made to reduce and prevent dialectal variation and promote one standard. High Common was essentially created through these efforts. This has met with mixed success.
5. Dialectal variation exploded. Common went from being a language spoken by high-tech Globalist revolutionaries to a language people increasingly spoke at home, across many social classes, religious and ethnic groups, etc. A great many local varieties and social registers began to appear and develop. The push to codify and promote High Common, and the eventual deprecation of borrowing in the standard language was partly in reaction to this trend. Most modern regional forms originated during the early and middle modern period.
6. There have been no major changes to the structure of standard High Common since the upheavals of the middle period - the seeds of change can be seen, but most change in High Common has been lexical rather than grammatical, and slower than earlier periods.
7. After the dominance of Common in technical fields was established, there was a marked shift towards discouraging borrowing in 'good' speech for the reasons noted above, as a push back against diversification, and out of a growing sense of pride in the language.

At the beginning of the modern period, the New World Order was established, but it was insecure and potentially fragile. Something to understand about the New World Order and Globalists is that they knew they would invoke tremendous (possibly justified) paranoia and hostility. The term 'Globalist' was a term of abuse in the early 21st century amongst radicals of all stripes at the time, and even mainstream politicians did not eagerly associate themselves with the epithet. The term 'New World Order' was associated with conspiracy theories of a shadowy cabal trying to create a global government. So what you can see about the Globalists is that they owned their enemies' hate, actively branded themselves with terms of abuse, and nakedly taunted their opponents by flat out copping to global conspiracy and calling themselves the New World Order.

The NWO is many things, but ironically, secretive is not one of them. They go less for lulling the population into complacency and more for direct provocation and confrontation, a quality they may have picked up from their opponents on the left and the right, who tended towards flamboyance. The NWO was and is generally clear about what it is doing and why. The NWO's way is to identify their opponents' fears and make them come true, to sap their spirit. In the early days, new and potentially shaky NWO-affiliated governments had two major problems: virulently hostile and violent nativist opposition, and starving populations. Some new NWO states in the global south like South India, Vietnam and various African states were lured into the NWO specifically for greater access to global trade and migration and to address severe food and water crises. In the mid 21st century, starvation was rampant even in formerly well-off 'first world' countries, but global south countries badly hit by global warming and nuclear war saw markedly reduced crop yields that exacerbated their problems.

The NWO killed two birds with one stone, so to speak. The NWO did and does not recognise most human rights, but they recognise one that wasn't even considered a right before the Global Collapse - the right of free movement and immigration anywhere on earth. Occasionally forcible, but without border controls or restrictions. The NWO early on implanted the populations in territories under its control with identity chips, so they were not concerned about losing track of people.

The NWO deliberately executed massive population movements, with care to create complex ethnic mixtures wherever possible, to make nativists' fears come true and make them a minority in their own countries. They also tried to cross-mix southern countries and to move people from better-off northern countries into the south as well (typically as a punishment for rebellion) to avoid ethnically homogeneous territories existing anywhere, but the effect was larger in some places than others, and the effect was overwhelmingly felt in the north. This was for practical reasons, because northern territory was generally better able to feed people than southern, and the world's crippled institutions and infrastructure did not at the time lend themselves well to efficiently moving goods, so people needed to be close to where food was produced.

In so doing, the NWO created a fertile ground for Common. Even before many people spoke the language, the authorities put up signs in Common everywhere and increasingly delivered government services in Common. Public education, such as it existed, was more and more in Common. Private classes sprang up everywhere. The highly deracinated population, generally resentful of Americans and English due to America's role in the Global Collapse, tended to favour Common as a lingua franca over English. The global elite assiduously learnt and used the language as an attempt to maintain their global unity amongst themselves, and heavily promoted free movement and intermarriage amongst the elites of different states to forestall nativist sentiments among the Globalist elites themselves. These elites were the wealthy and powerful, and the high status accorded to their language caused many people to want to imitate it as a way to get ahead.

Essentially, the NWO was desperate to wipe away old allegiances and strengthen new ones in order to lessen its insecurity. Once Common got in, it quickly came to be seen as a means to that end, and even the more sceptical Globalist leaders became attached to it.

The other options were multilingualism, which Globalist leaders fretted was just another force of rivalry and disunity, English, which had a lot of bad feelings against it outside North America and which was a worrying rallying point for the North American opposition, and Esperanto. Esperanto is another constructed language dating back to the 19th century, which, unlike Common, was actually designed for international communication with the intention of being easy to learn. There was a significant community of Esperantists in the Globalist movement who rallied to the movement's stated ideals of global unity and peace, and saw the movement as an opportunity to promote their language as well. They had been trying to promote people to switch from Common to Esperanto throughout the revolutionary period, but Common speakers didn't like Esperanto because Esperanto was relatively transparent to understand, and that was the opposite of what the Common speakers were going for, so it didn't gain much ground.

Esperanto had a window of opportunity during the early consolidation phase of the NWO, because ease of learning started to become a selling point. However, the Esperantists in the Globalist movement tended towards the movement's anti-capitalist wing, for reasons that are not completely clear. During the early internecine purges after the establishment of the NWO, where the anti-capitalist wing was expunged, thousands of Esperantists were killed, and with them the best chance to make a pitch for Esperanto instead of Common as the global lingua franca. Common became increasingly mythologized in the NWO, and never faced a serious challenge again.

The New World Order has several things they tout as accomplishments:

1. They solved the energy problem. The Cascadians, already the world leaders in computer technology, became very advanced in biotechnology, and used this ability to perfect and mass produce the photofermentors they acquired when na Epekwit acceded to the NWO. This is the technology that uses surplus renewable energy from wind and solar to generate biofuel that is used in turn to make liquid fuels for military equipment and flight, and hydrocarbon feedstock for chemical synthesis. Combined with various storage technologies, especially liquefied air turbine and battery technology for electrical load balancing, and the development of a decentralized and computerised electrical grid, NWO territories slowly became consistently electrified again, and this is one of the NWO's central claims to legitimacy.
2. As a corollary to that, they stopped the growth of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere almost completely, and while global warming is expected to top out at over 3 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial average, humanity is no longer driving up carbon dioxide levels and making the problem worse. This is a second claim to legitimacy for the NWO and a major source of their justification to attack or embargo noncompliant states like Britain - they call us ecological criminals because we synthesise liquid hydrocarbons from our remaining coal reserves (but they do not share the technologies that would eliminate this necessity).
3. In the modern NWO, there are a lot of poor and hungry people, but at long last, hardly anyone is starving anymore, and most people have access to adequate quantities of relatively safe drinking water, especially in the cities. This is a third pillar of the NWO's legitimacy.

Hence, the NWO exists in constant existential struggle against extremist terrorists (or as the NWO calls them, 'trols') of all stripes who attack the power grid and food and water production and transportation infrastructure, in order to shut off the lights and starve the population, so the people will see the NWO's illegitimacy and revolt. This in turn has attracted a loyal core of the population to support the NWO as a bulwark against the terrorists, and that's perhaps why the NWO hasn't completely wiped out the terrorists despite their advantages over them - the extremists are, in some sense, objective allies of the NWO in their deadly dance with it.

As well, even in the modern era, the world has simply not recovered to anything like the heights of the early 21st century. Yes, technological civilization survived and yes, some areas of technology like computers and biotech are more refined, but in general, the modern world is tired and broken and cruel, and healing only slowly. The NWO may have the ability to have unprecedented insight into the lives of their citizens, but they lack the resources to fully take advantage of this and to completely succeed as totalitarians, relying on making a case for the population's loyalty coupled with fits of brutality to bridge the gap.

The offensiveness of the NWO to libertarians, anarchists, nativists, and anti-capitalists is obvious. What is less obvious is why religious groups hate the NWO with a particular passion. It comes down to the fact that religion is a rival globalising influence, especially evangelising religions like Christianity and Islam. The New World Order is especially hostile to rival globalists, and initial coolness to religion in the movement blossomed into de facto state-sponsored atheism. Religion is not banned, but overtly religious people and religious institutions are harassed and persecuted.

In addition, the New World Order is relatively good on freedom and respect for sexual and gender minorities and on gender equality, having standards comparable to or sometimes even better than Britain. They culturally promote sex as something people should feel free to enjoy, and businesses that sell sex in various ways operate with full state blessing. Sex education is a feature of public school education everywhere, birth control is cheap and easily available, and abortions are available everywhere on demand. Persons can change their legal gender relatively easily, nonbinary official options exist, and medical treatment for gender affirmation is readily available for those who can afford it.

This probably fits into the NWO's pattern of deliberately provoking their opponents, because the sexual and gender liberalism of the NWO enrages religious extremists. This has tended to be picked up as well by the regime's other opponents. Savage attacks against gay people and women, particularly women in positions of authority, are common in areas with significant trol presences. The security forces take such attacks seriously, but the NWO also derives a benefit from these attacks by driving the communities attacked closer to the NWO for fear of what would happen if it ever fell.

Against this backdrop, are several influences on the Common language:

1. Social class and special forms of address: NWO society has become stratified and Globalists don't even pretend to be egalitarian. They are elitist and proud of it. In response, Common has developed a relatively rich vocabulary of formal address and respect terms, as well as terms of disrespect and abuse.
2. Sex and gender: Common started out with little or no grammaticalization of natural gender, because this fit the ethos of Hillbillies. Relatively little explicitly gendered vocabulary has been borrowed and there is a rich vocabulary to talk about sexual and gender identity. There is also a rich vocabulary to discuss sexual acts, both in official High Common and in regional variants. The language does have terms of abuse related to femininity and homosexuality, but these are mostly concentrated in regional Low Common dialects and have considerable regional variation, because they have little presence in the global elite culture. There has been some growth in the coining and use of intrinsically gendered words for people and relationships, but the language remains relatively gender-neutral.
3. Violent terminology: Common started out with little vocabulary to talk about violence. 'Skurun', 'to hit' might have been the most violent word in the language, and it was not even explicitly about violence. The people who adopted the language, however, were often quite enthusiastically violent, and even if not, dealt with horrific violence more or less daily. Accordingly, Common picked up quite a rich vocabulary for violent and brutal acts. A little bit was coined by repurposing existing words, more was calqued, and quite a lot was borrowed. Aside from quite a lot that is part of the official vocabulary of High Common and global in scope, slang terms for violent acts are a major source of dialectic variation and vary a lot around the world, Such terms sometimes come from substratum languages in a local area. Low Common dialects typically have about as much vocabulary for violent acts as neighbouring languages, sometimes more.
4. Cursing and crude language: Common had a couple of curse words in Hillbillies, which if they are still used at all are considered extremely mild in modern times. Common developed quite a rich vocabulary of invective, mainly scatological and violent or sexual, in much the same way as it picked up words for violent acts. A number of them are common in High Common, like the word 'na fok', from the English word 'fuck'.Curse words tended to develop during the dialectal diversification during the early modern period and be quite regional. Terms rooted in religious taboo are used in some areas. Words for violent acts are also sometimes the basis for curse words. Even if a person has a perfect High Common accent, how they curse can often reveal their geographic origins.
5. Technical vocabulary: Common started out with an incomplete and weak technical vocabulary, Due to concerted and deliberate efforts, Common now has excellent technical vocabulary and has replaced English as the language of science and technology in the New World Order territories.
6. Political terminology: The NWO has spawned a complete lexicon of political terminology to give itself a lens to view itself and the world. This world view does not resemble the benevolent society of Hillbillies very much. Accordingly, the original political vocabulary has been either heavily modified in meaning or is no longer used. The NWO does not like to use borrowings in this area and so has tended to coin a lot of new terms using existing, Old Common vocabulary.
7. Lexical drift and sound shifts: Common has experienced normal lexical drift and sound shifts in the way people actually speak over its territory, and counteracting influences have been only partially effective. Access to long distance transportation is available for the well-to-do, although not nearly as cheap and easy as in the early 21st century. For others it is often out of reach. Travel is possible but an ordeal. Mass communications and global culture do exist, and there is a global media and entertainment industry that works in High Common, so there is that as a unifying influence. However, as noted, the modern world is tired. Lexical drift has impacted High Common itself, and further change is ongoing despite attempts to rein it in.

According to the 2115 Global Census conducted by the New World Order, there were 7.2 billion people in the world at that time, and 11%, or around 800 million, spoke Common as a first language. They estimated there were approximately 4.5 billion second language speakers. There are potential problems with these numbers. First of all, obviously they don't include Britain, Israel, South Korea, Japan or Quebec. The NWO naturally views itself as sovereign in the 'noncompliant states', and used estimates to make up for its lack of access. Secondly, there are still some areas that the NWO nominally controls, like Florida and the Caribbean, but which are in fact largely lawless a few kilometres away from the NWO military outposts and from which they were not in a good position to collect reliable data. However, these numbers are the best we have, and the consensus amongst British scholars of Common and the NWO is that they are probably accurate enough.

These numbers also do not necessarily include significant numbers of speakers of Common-based Creoles and pidgins. The numbers of such speakers are not completely known, but such speech forms are thought to be common amongst the countless millions of indentured labourers (essentially slaves) who grow much of the world's food, for example.

Conclusion

This discussion is necessarily incomplete but hopefully will give us a background to talk about the origins of words and idioms going forward in terms of the history of the language. Next we will return to a grammatical discussion, looking at modifiers,