How should I do languages?

[Sword_of_Spirit]

First off, I finally finished playing around and experimenting while going through the documentation, and started working on my official World, and even got to use it a little bit in last night's game. I must say: Awesome!

Since languages are generally associated with ethnicities, and since I have topics for the latter, I've just been putting a Language tag where that is the case, and using an alias for the ethnicity topic if the language has a name different from the ethnicity.

But then I ran into a bump. There are several languages in my world that are shared by multiple ethnicities, races, and species. I thought maybe I could have a group of topics just for such languages, but if I'm going to do that, maybe I should just make all languages a topic (with appropriate links or tags to/from ethnicities).

Any thoughts? Are you using languages, and what has worked for you?

 

[kbs666]

In my realm languages are a mechanics thing so they have a custom article in the mechanics reference side of things. I use tags for big groupings like modern, archaic and planar

 

[Silveras]

Unless you plan to expand on the subject and add things like sample words, notes about pronunciation, comments on grammar, and/or information about distinctions in the writing (see the Appendices to the Lord of the Rings for examples ), then a topic per language is going to be awfully empty... and that seems wasteful.

You could make a custom category for language families, then a topic per language family, and make the individual languages aliases on that topic.

For my own uses, since I have the characters in HeroLab, I rely on that more than RealmWorks for tracking what languages a given character speaks. I suppose I should put the same information into RealmWorks on the Individual, for easy reference outside of combat.

 

[Sword_of_Spirit]

Thanks!

 

[AEIOU]

I use the Lost Lands as a campaign setting. It has numerous regional languages. While I've added these languages to Hero Lab, I also have them entered into Realm Works under the Mechanics section. This way I can keep track of their differences and who is likely to speak them -- some are spoken-only, some are dead, some are recent, some originated on another continent, some are spoken by certain classes. I could care less about grammar and such. Rather I'm interested in the historical context and how/where they spread. Migrations, wars and trade all influence language and culture.

The bottom line is that I find it useful in the campaign setting I use. Most things in RealmWorks are judgement calls. The real question is whether tracking languages is important TO YOU?