How did people who speak different languages communicate in the past if language barrier is a thing even now?
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Vehicular languages, for example if a 14th century Basque wants to trade with a Turk, he doesn’t learn Turkish and the Turk doesn’t learn Basque, they both learn Mediterranian Lingua Franca (mainly Venetian/Genoese and Occitan/Catalan rather than French) which is widely spoken by merchants throughout the Mediterranian and surrounding areas so you can use it to talk to just about any traveller, trader or seaman. Other regions had their own vehicular languages, eg in the Far East it was Classical Chinese, even after Chinese speakers had moved on to speaking more recent dialects, along the Silk Road it was Sogdian. Nowadays the most common is English, eg if Japanese and Chinese business people have a meeting there’s a good chance they will communicate in English but the International English they will use is slowly becoming it’s own dialect, with different usages and loan words.
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