: Stranded Society Speaking Same Language Let's start with a scenario: a dozen babies are left on an island in the middle of the ocean and are brought up by monkeys. When they come of age,

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I largely agree with @dmm 's answer and I upvoted it. Let me add: Depending on what you're trying to do with this story, you could make a significant portion of the story be the children's effort to decipher the message. They could find an artifact with the message on it, and figure out that those lines and scratches must be some sort of writing. Lots of civilizations have thought of the idea of writing, so it wouldn't be a stretch to suppose that these children can grasp the idea when they see it even if they don't think of it themselves. Then someone remembers seeing some picture books with similar scratches in the wreckage of the ship or whatever, and they compare and see, yes, the same arrangement of lines occurs in both. Etc.

I'd guess it would be very unlikely that they could decipher a foreign language without SOME sort of key. Archaeologists have puzzled over some ancient languages for centuries without figuring them out, and that's lots of smart people with all sorts of resources. If the children are totally abandoned and have to invent their own language, then presumably no one can leave them an English/islander dictionary. So they'd have to have some other key -- like dmm's/Edgar Rice Burroughs's idea of picture books intended to teach children to read.

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The original Tarzan book deals with this situation. His parents had several years' worth of picture and children's books, which they intended to use to educate him while they did whatever they were doing in Africa (which I forget) before they were marooned by pirates. [edit: Then they both died while Tarzan was still a baby.] So, yeah, they had a homeschooling curriculum, and Tarzan [later, as a grown ape-man]used it to self-educate himself. Plus he had his parents' books and their diary. When Tarzan met Jane, he could read and write English but not speak it.

However, don't expect ordinary mortals to get these kinds of self-instructed homeschooling results! According to Wikipedia,

[Tarzan] learns a new language in days, ultimately speaking many
languages, including that of the great apes, French, English, Dutch,
German, Swahili, many Bantu dialects, Arabic, ancient Greek, ancient
Latin, Mayan, the languages of the Ant Men and of Pellucidar.

He also communicates with many species of jungle animals.

Plus he won the Scripps Spelling Bee. ;-)

I'm thinking your kids won't all be homeschooled uber-men like Tarzan. OTOH, you have a bunch of them, so they could work together on the problem. That makes figuring out written language not outside the realm of possibility. J.R.R. Tolkien and his sister had their own language. Kids are really smart when they're not wasting their minds on TV and video games.

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