Re: Odd Idea

IMHO, the scenario seems logically possible, but not probable.   The more
fantastic or surreal the context, the more plausible the scenario becomes.

Let's assume we're dealing with something like alternate Earth history.

If you're talking about everybody becoming nomads, this is implausible.
Superstition alone would not prompt people to abandon a medieval agrarian
lifestyle for the less prosperous and more vulnerable life of the nomad.   A
large wave of hostile invaders, like the Europeans invading the Americas,
would more effectively convert an agrarian society into a nomadic one.

On the other hand, a superstition that creates a class of nomadic outcasts
is perfectly plausible.   Twins, red-heads, short people, you name it, could
become roving pariahs.

Why would the nomads try to convince people that they were speaking a
language when they weren't, and who would they be trying to convince?
Obviously, these are closely related questions.   Do your nomads make money
by speaking in tongues?

Are you presupposing that your nomads are moving from village to village?
They could sell magical cures, provide entertainment, or even carry news or
parcels from one village to the next as a kind of mail-carrier caste.

It's tough to imagine evolution from nonsense language to language game to
pidgin.   Put a monolingual English speaker and a monolingual French speaker
on an island, and you can bet that distorting one language a la pig latin
will not be useful for either speaker.

Deliberate invention seems like a more reasonable drive for the developments
you describe.   It would be as if someone made fun of speaking in tongues
(shunda) by making it a language game (shunlangdaguage e shungameda) and
then having someone make a secret language that sounded like the language
game so that anyone caught speaking it could claim to be kidding around.

It would be more natural to have your pariahs speaking a trade language or
lingua franca to begin with, and then have a distorted form of this (a
language game) get converted into a more sophisticated secret language as
times get tougher for the pariahs.

IMHO, ;-)

Jim