FFVII Language

[mimi_sardinia]

I caught myself contemplating something that came up in a Fanficrants post (one that I think I actually posted) about language.

The esencial point was that someone who commented said they got odd comments from reviewers because they wrote of Cloud swearing in Nibel - or in other words, the native language of the Nibelheim region.

What caught me in my latest thoughts on this is what language does Cid speak? I've seen FF7 maps, I know Rocket Town is on the same continent as Nibelheim, but I have this impression that it's not really a naturally occuring township - or if it was, it was little more than a tiny village before ShinRa decided it was a good place for the space program to be established.

So the question is, where, originally, do people believe Cid Highwind comes from? Midgar? Somewhere else? If that can be decided then the language he swears in would be far easier to pin down (because as was once said in a novel I read, people swear in their native language).

Comments

[feywood.livejournal.com]

What I wonder is... what's the point of inventing languages such as this Nibel? The entire game is either in Japanese, English, Chinese, French or Spanish (don't know if it's been translated into any other languages)
Never do they even hint at the very existence of of local language, so it just seems a little pointless to me.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

Well it seems a bit daft to name the language someone is speaking "English" if they live in a world that has no England, though as far as local languages matter in the FF7 world at least I could believe that almost everyone speaks the same language as Midgar - except for Wutai who have enough of a grudge to want to hold onto their own - so if one were to call the main language "Midgarian" (if the subject even comes up) and leave it at that... well it implies they actually noticed that the Planet doesn't have an "England" or a "Japan".