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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 1191609" data-attributes="member: 2205">Of course, unless your game is fairly broad-reaching geographically, it's a bit of a moot point.  Even in the middle ages, when languages were as isolated and fragmented as Europe has ever been historically, you could travel fairly large areas without having much more than minor dialectical differences.Also, keep in mind that historically a language spread (as talinthas stated) is often introduced along with another population element (although not always "invasion" model per se) which tends to make large areas have fairly homogenous languages.  Even as this breaks up into dialects and later distinct language through language drift, the close nature of the daughter languages means that you can do a lot with them.  Looking at the large expanses of Romance languages today, for example, that developed from the "vulgar Latin" over the last thousand or so years, it's interesting to note that the languages are largely mutually intelligible still.  For example, when I was in Argentina, I'd see stories on the news where Argentine reporters would be talking to people on the streets in Brasil or Italy and literally speaking Spanish to them and getting answers back in Portugeuse or Italian and everybody seemed to pretty much understand what was going on.The same thing is largely true for the spread of the Slavic languages which occured more or less at the same time.  For instance, I went to Prague a few years ago with my brothers.  One of my brothers speaks Polish fluently and another one speaks Russian fluently.  The Polish-speaking brother could generally hold fairly intelligent conversations with the Czechs by simply speaking to them in Polish and listening to their answers in Czech.  My Russian-speaking brother on the other hand, had a little bit harder time, since Russian belongs to another sub-group of the Slavic languages and has a greater degree of seperation than Polish vs Czech, but he could do fairly well understanding basic concepts as well too.  And even I, who speak no closely related language, was able to pick up some stuff based on ancient shared Indo-European heritage and more recent historical Latin loanwords.I'm not sure how to model this in the game, but the point is, there should be some middle ground between sharply demarcated language barriers and the easily playable "Common tongue" phenomena.  What I'd probably do for a continent sized landmass in a campaign setting, is have no more than two or three language "families."  Assuming a character was fluent (probably native) in a given language, I'd allow him to make checks to understand any language in the language family and be able to at least get the "gist" of what was being said.  As they spent more time in an area, I'd allow these checks to get closer and closer to the actual meaning, and I might eventually even give the player the language "for free" for RP reasons if they spend a fair amount of time using the language and getting used to the specifics of that language relative to one they already know.For learning a language that's unrelated, I'd probably require them to actually spend points on it as they level up.  It's a big deal to go and learn a completely different language from scratch.This would effectively model my real life experience in learning Spanish as a native English speaker vs. picking up a lot of Portugeuse and Italian by working with speakers of those languages in Spanish.  It would also satisfy the amateur linguist in me, add a layer of verisimillitude to the game, yet not sacrifice too much the playability of the game.</blockquote>

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