Common vocabulary of Noen

As trade expanded throughout throughout Noen, various languages ended up replacing many of their lexical words with those of the worldwide trade language. This relexification is slightly more extensive than the adoption of terms derived from Latin and Greek into English. A close analogy is the sort of mixed language that English became in the eleventh century CE when the conquerors' Norman French was bolted on top of it, or Chamorro that replaced much of its vocabulary with that of Spanish, whose speakers had colonized Guam.

At some point, governments pushed the common vocabulary as an intentional policy. At the time, it was thought to be the best middle ground to keep language barriers from delaying the spread of scientific knowledge while preserving the individual character of each culture's native tongue. One benefit is that a speaker of a language that has assimilated the common vocabulary might be able to pick out a few words in another such language and possibly get the gist of what's being talked about. It would sound like a very thick Poirot-speak: the lexical words would be familiar but the inflections, prepositions, helping verbs, and word order not so much. The common vocabulary brings about mutual intelligibility that discourages tribalism, yet allowing indigenous peoples to keep those parts of their languages not covered by the common vocabulary helps preserve knowledge of their parts of the world.

Had something like this been done in real-world Europe, it might helped Gregor Mendel's cracking of dominant and recessive traits spread past Hungary.