We've got a variety of NPCs without the Echo. The Echo's "ability to understand spoken language" is even just that. It's entirely useless for written texts. Or speaking in another language. I know people like to liken it to like a built-in google translate, but lore panels have vetoed that. It's literally a "I know this is what ____ is trying to communicate without actually knowing the words" mechanism.
Cid, Alphinaud, any number of Garleans, the sky pirates in the current 24-person raids, and the list could go on. Our characters may have a blessed understanding of languages, but the people around them do not. And can still understand plenty of things with the common language. The game even specifically gives us special text boxes when it's to be implied we're understanding something through the Echo instead of through natural language processing.
I agree that an absence of evidence does not correlate to evidence of absence, but there's is a strong lack of evidence to show that these languages are used in daily life, or they would be alluded to more often. From a linguistics standpoint, dialects are not considered different languages. when I took a minor in the subject just a couple years ago, the instructors generally broke things down like this.
Accent: Differences in pronunciation. Slight spelling changes. Syntax and grammar are the same. Mutually intelligible.
Dialect: May involve an accent. Includes slang and diction changes. Minor changes in syntax and grammar. Mostly intelligible.
Language: Clear distinctions in mean from pronunciation. Large changes in diction. Syntax and grammar are distinctly different. They can be extremely similar, like Hindi and Urdu (it's one of the more common pairings brought up).
Cid, Alphinaud, any number of Garleans, the sky pirates in the current 24-person raids, and the list could go on. Our characters may have a blessed understanding of languages, but the people around them do not. And can still understand plenty of things with the common language. The game even specifically gives us special text boxes when it's to be implied we're understanding something through the Echo instead of through natural language processing.
I agree that an absence of evidence does not correlate to evidence of absence, but there's is a strong lack of evidence to show that these languages are used in daily life, or they would be alluded to more often. From a linguistics standpoint, dialects are not considered different languages. when I took a minor in the subject just a couple years ago, the instructors generally broke things down like this.
Accent: Differences in pronunciation. Slight spelling changes. Syntax and grammar are the same. Mutually intelligible.
Dialect: May involve an accent. Includes slang and diction changes. Minor changes in syntax and grammar. Mostly intelligible.
Language: Clear distinctions in mean from pronunciation. Large changes in diction. Syntax and grammar are distinctly different. They can be extremely similar, like Hindi and Urdu (it's one of the more common pairings brought up).
