Stark (short for Starways Common and also called Common and Starcommon) is the common interstellar language. In the 3000-year gap between the novels Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead it evolved from "IF Common," which in turn evolved from American English. Characters have occasionally cited that the only reason Stark has English as its ancestor is because America was technologically predominant at the beginning of the space age and in particular, when the IF was created. It was hinted that most planets have small American minorities who learn Stark as a first language, but that the majority of humans learn it as a second or even third language. It is the official language of the Starways Congress and the primary language of most of the Hundred Worlds.
Although the characters of Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind speak Stark, their speech has been translated into English in the books, so the reader has no way of ascertaining the difference between the languages. Ender Wiggin, who grew up on Earth thousands of years earlier and speaks American English natively, notes that Stark is very similar to English. Another hint is found in Shadow of the Giant when Ender's mother corrects Bean's grammar pointing out that Bean should have used "whom" instead of "who". Bean responds: "I speak common, not English, and in common there is no such word as 'whom'".
Read more about this topic: Concepts In The Ender's Game Series
Famous quotes containing the word stark:
“During a walk or in a book or in the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything. The bare fact of existence paralyzes me... To be alive is so incredible that all I can do is to lie still and merely breathe—like an infant on its back in a cot. It is impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass.”
—W.N.P. Barbellion (1889–1919)
“Over the stark plain
The stilted mill-chimneys once again spread
Their sackcloth and ashes a flowing mane
Of repentance for the false day that’s fled.”
—William Robert Rodgers (1909–1969)
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)