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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Great Mastiff Games" data-source="post: 1930312" data-attributes="member: 25783">Well, my answer certainly isn't definitive, or perhaps even what you're looking for, but when I designed the Acrohelion campaign setting, I tried to give each nation a very distinctive and consistent naming tradition.  For example, for Aesios, the paladin-kingdom, most place names end in -os (Chascos, Hippomachos, etc.), while men's names end in -es more often than not (Thipres, Acristanes, etc.) and women's in -a or -ia (Aprecenia, Esartia, etc.).  For Ilebebasec, the desert-kingdom in the south, the names are made up of a lot of short syllables, often with one of the syllables repeated twice.  There are male, female, and neuter endings to the words, -er for masculine, -et for feminine, -ec   for neuter, for example.  This gives a properly exotic-sounding language .... with kind of a hard sound also, which is fitting to an area where civil wars of unification are underway.Psarathosha, one of the northern human kingdoms, uses a lot of th, sh, ch, zh in the names, giving it a distinctive feel.  Vervenao, its rival, has a lot of dipthongs in its names -- ui, ao, oi, ea, etc. etc. For the non-human races, I used pretty much the same idea.  I found that trying to make the language based on the sounds we might associate with an animal close to the inhuman races makes names that either lack enough variety or just sound plain old silly.  The molossovirs -- mastiff-men, as you might say -- have national languages and naming traditions, rather than a 'racial language' based on barks and growls (which was tried in the early stages of development).  Similarly, the medusae who rule Arar, one of the world's evil kingdoms, have names made up on the basis of a loose set of grammatical rules, rather than based on snakes' hissing.  The racial language concept seems pretty ineffectual, IMO, and often just results in cliches or really limited naming conventions.That's my take on the situation, anyway .... I don't know if my ramblings are of any help, but I hope so!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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