Do You Use Different Languages In Your Campaign?

[Arkhandus]

(after counting)

My homebrew has 71 languages listed in the house rules documents. It would be 74 if I allowed three of the core rules languages (which are used in the core rules by creatures that don't exist at all in my homebrew): Gnoll, Halfling, and Sylvan are out.

Dang. And I only have 41 in my Aurelia general-house-rules document right now (though that's excluding the probably 10 or 15 other monster languages that I haven't gathered together yet from some of the monster books I have). Well, at least once I get around to describing the minorities and their languages, and the few miscellaneous dialects of major languages in other regions, it'll be roughly as large a number. Aurelia has no Common, just cultural tongues, racial tongues, and spiritual/extraplanar tongues.

 

[Wombat]

Back in my D20 days, we dropped Common very early on. That and most races had multiple languages, not just humans. So, yes, languages became very, very important (we developed a Language skill -- 1 rank = 1 language beyond your native tongue), as did spells that allowed for translation.

Still, this was cumbersome to work under the D20 system. This was one of many factors that eventually moved our group away from D20.

 

[Raven Crowking]

For my home game, I don't use the D&D family of languages. Why should every creature from the same plane speak the same language?

 

[Tinker Gnome]

I just use the PHB languages. Most everyone speaks Common.

 

[GreatLemur]

I personally think Common is a pretty dumb idea (and so are racial languages, really), but I have to cop to always using some "trade tongue" or "language of the old empire" bit to stand in for it. They sound a little more justified, sure, but they're basically just Common all over again. One of these days, I'm going to give people a more developed campaign setting to play in, and languages will be a much more local thing. I generally play the the kind of people who'd like to have more non-combat challenges. And, hell, any D&D character with an Intelligence bonus is multilingual, anyway.

 

[robberbaron]

My 'world' has each country with a native tongue, which may be shared with some of its neighbours. There are 'modern' and 'archaic' versions of most racial languages, including Human.
There are also distinct alphabets used and some languages may share words and meanings but use different alphabets.

I also have 3 levels of language knowledge, reprasenting the odd word, good tourist vocabulary and native.

I'm not really sure how many of my players buy in to this fairly complex system, but it hasn't been the hard work I though it might have been when I devised it.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Language plays a part in the game as it creates cultural boundaries.

I run a DL variant so I have two "common" tongues: Solamnic in Ansalon and Aurim in Taladas. Given the breadth and scope of the old Empires, they remain an oft used neutral language, much as Latin did well throughout the middle ages. These are widely used and will likely be understood on their respective continent by civilized peoples.

Barbarians tend to shun such tongues and stick to what they are familiar with. For instance the tribes in northern Taladas speak Tamiran, a very old tongue that according to the Tamiran elves predates the "civilized" elven tongue.

Dwarven and Kender (halfling) are permutations of the Gnomish tongue; they use a common alphabet and in writing use a common core vocabulary but have different sentence structures. They have diverged radically in pronunciation formats and are incomprehensible to each other in the spoken word.

Excluding the tamiran elves, elves speak elven but with dialect & accent shifts (think England, the U.S. and India for Sylvanosti, Qualinosti, and Kagonesti) that can be understood after a short period of acclimitization.

Lots of the monstrous races rely on giant (gray gem mutations of ogre/irda) as their base tongue, again with varying accents.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

For my home game, I don't use the D&D family of languages. Why should every creature from the same plane speak the same language?

They all have the same alignment, they have good/evil/law/chaos/fire/water/air/earth built in like we have flesh and blood. All speaking the same language is the least of the weirdnesses in that picture .

 

[ruleslawyer]

Exactly.

Planescape's treatment of alignment exemplars aside, I really have never believed in an ecology or society, in the commonly understood sense, for demons, devils, and the like. They are corporeal representations of abstract ideals, and as such don't really require those things to fulfil their role. What is the family of languages that angels speak in the Judeo-Christian tradition, after all? Why can the devas and asuras of Hindu mythology talk to each other without translation problems?

I've always preferred the idea that outsiders and elementals, as somewhat abstract beings, communicate with mortals via translated telepathy; basically, the creature communicates on the purely mental plane and a mortal understands that communication as speech (with a colorful effect imparted according to the outsider's nature, and the mortal's perception of that nature). So a fire elemental communicating with a Red Wizard might seem to be speaking Thayan, but in a voice that sounds like hissing, crackling flames given speech. Perhaps outsiders do have a spoken language, but that language resembles the Dark Speech or Words of Creation; it is a tangible manifestation of power with its own concrete effects.

 

[Superj3nius]

well i wish we would do stuff like this but our dm likes it easier, i being able to speak a good deal of german, and play a dwarf say that dwdarven is the equivelent of german, so i can write and speak in character, we have our ninja that above the table speaks a good deal of japanese so he gets to chose one language that his character speaks and say that its japanese, this way the dm still has the simplicity of just getting an online translator and translating it but at the same time tying the players in just a little more