How and Why Did the Grounders in “The 100” Create an Entirely New Language After the Apocalypse?
The first few episodes of The 100’s Season 2 reveal that the Grounders are being hunted by the Mountain Men, who want to take them back to Mount Weather and harvest their blood or turn them into Reapers. The Grounders and the Mountain Men have been engaged in a war for almost a century, with a very high body count on the Grounders’ side (think of that room full of caged Grounders Clarke finds in 2x02).
From 2x02: Clarke (Eliza Taylor) discovers hundreds of Grounders being tortured inside Mount Weather.
Keeping in mind that before Season 2, the Grounders knew little, if anything, about the Mountain Men (other than that they were a threat), it made sense from a strategic standpoint to change the language spoken by the Grounders’ community . Everyone in Mount Weather only spoke English, so creating this new language, Trigedasleng, ensured that the Mountain Men would not be able to understand the Grounders’ battle plans. Lincoln (Ricky Whittle) tells Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos) that the warriors still learn English, presumably so they can still understand what the enemy is saying.
According to the show’s language creator, David J. Peterson, Trigedasleng is really just a heavily accented version of English. Most of the words come from the same roots as modern English words, but as with all languages, it has developed over time, and it no longer resembles English as much as it probably once did.