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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8741149" data-attributes="member: 29398">Yep - sounds like ENWorld. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />That's just it - the way I see it, most species either live in or were raised in regions pretty much dominated by their own kind.  I've always had Elves and Dwarves be rather isolationist, and Hobbits also tend to live among their own kind.  My Gnomes are an interesting variant, though: they lost their homeland a long time ago on which they renamed their species to match their language - Snooka.  Since then, even though widely scattered and somewhat nomadic, they maintain that language as a point of sheer stubborn pride.So, even if a Dwarf lives in a mixed-species city now, odds are high she was raised among Dwarves in a Dwarven land somewhere.  And even if not, odds are even higher - or much higher - that the Dwarf was raised by Dwarves who almost certainly will have taught her Dwarvish as her mother tongue.Same thing in the real world, and we see it all the time: someone from one culture (let's say French) whose family lives in a different one (let's say the UK) grows up using their own culture's language with family at home and the regional language elsewhere; so in this case speaks French at home and English when out and about.So here those Elves would learn Elvish from their parents/family as their mother tongue and would learn whatever the regional language is either from school or through constant exposure.I'm not disagreeing there's a very good argument that says there should be more than one Elvish language, just like there's more than one Human.  I have four - five if you count Drow -, one for each sub-species of Elf in my setting; but I could just as easily make them regional (and one is already both: Arctic Elves only live in the very far north*, and have their own distinct language).  Keeping it by sub-species is just easier on the bookkeeping.* - and very far south, but as nobody's ever really gone more than a few miles south of the equator I probably don't need to worry about this for a while yet. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />===================Tangential questions: do (the general) you assume all PCs are literate and-or that literacy is widespread in your setting, or do you have literacy uncommon to rare other than among the nobility and learned types e.g. mages and sages?  And in either case, do you have them literate in all their languages or just some; also do you assume every language even has a written form?</blockquote>

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