Languages

[Torx]

How do you do languages in your games? Whether it be Elven, Orcish, French, Norweigan, or an ancient unnamed script, both written and spoken - how is it done?

Does the DM/GM make up spoken language, or delve into the depths of intricacy a la Tolkein? Are notes/clues/runes hand scripted or computer printed? Is there any congruity and continuity, or does Orcish sound like German one night and pig grunting the next?

What about languages for groups where some characters understand it and others do not - how is this handled?

For example, I was once in a group in which the DM and two players spoke passable German - so we worked a gimic in which Dwarven was German and their characters always knew Dwarven and ours did not. Made it a problem if you wanted to play a dwarf, but *shrugs shoulders* Any thoughts/ideas/comments?

 

[Desdichado]

In my group, we have eight folks that speak English (probably obvious) but other than that, not much in common. I still speak a passable Spanish, and another guy still speaks a decent Japanese, one of the gals does a little bit here and there in French, but really nothing we can use. In my experience, that's been about as good as you can expect, which doesn't help much.

So, if only one character understands a given language we either, depending on the group I've played with, just said it anyway and said "this is elven" or whatever and trusted the other folks to not act as if they really understood it, or passed notes back and forth between GM and the guy who could understand the NPC. For more extensive interaction, the GM would occasionally take the guy in another room.

Now, we do occasionally use accents. You should have heard the Bronx accents we did in our Saturday Night Fever game!

 

[Talvisota]

I think languages add a lot to campaign flavor, and I have detailed them to enough of a degree to make them unique and interesting in my campaigns.

e.g.

Manyar, the people who inhabited the region before the migration - based on Hungarian, as it is non-european and cool sounding. Used Hungarian for place names and such.

Burzhen, a people who are decendents of the Manyar, language I based on Finnish, which is in the same lang. family as Hungarian. (and, interestingly, what Tolkien used to base elvish, but I did not realize that until I had used it in my campaign.)

Dwarven had rough consonant stops and sputters, and I made the vocab sound really odd.

Orcish was based on central asian languages - Kazakh and Kyrgyz, to be exact. They sound rough and have funny vowels, and had a simple vocab and grammar with a ton of common borrowings.

Drow and elvish were really long languages, with supra-complex grammar. Conversations in elvish took two or three times as long as in human tongues.

Just some fun so that the world had a bit more color.