There was an interesting conversation the other day over at r/osr about using languages in a hexcrawl. One person dismissed the idea of languages as a part of resource management, on the grounds that they're both binary and inexhaustible—you either have a language or you don't, and once you have it, it doesn't even take up space or get used up the way torches and rations do. I took issue with the “you either have it or you don't” claim, though:
But language isn't like that, even if a lot of game rules (which tend to assume that players don't care about languages, but throw in some options just in case they do, or simply for flavor) treat it that way. Language is a medium of communication, but it's also a medium of culture.
You can have enough knowledge of a language to interact productively with speakers of that language (in trade or diplomacy or just asking for directions or whatever), but at the same speak time it in such a limited (or stilted, or archaic) way that you're marked as an outsider. Greater fluency, mastery of idiomatic expressions, etc. can set strangers at ease and dispose them positively toward you in a way that mere comprehension of their words never could. (And of course even in terms of simple comprehension, there's a continuum—you can have enough of a language to go shopping, make small talk, and flirt at the bar, but be completely out of your depth if you find yourself in court.)
Definitely agree that the use of “Common” plus a laundry list of racial languages in many games is almost pointless (or at least largely redundant to simple non-mechanical character background stuff, its only real purpose being to establish that, say, this dwarf is cool with elves in a way most dwarves aren't). If you want to make language interesting, you need to tailor it to the setting. All the characters' languages of origin are meaningless (unless they're also spoken in the setting, or unless all the PCs share a single foreign language, which they can then use as a sort of secret code in front of NPCs), but knowledge of local languages shapes not just their access to information but their access to social resources.
And then, of course, I kept thinking about it. And because I've been doing some Outcast Silver Raiders prep recently, I've also been thinking about medieval Scotland a bunch. The Mythic North is a pretty detailed setting, with a lot of NPCs from different cultural backgrounds, and the game does have explicit rules about languages (explicit in that PCs speak 1–4 of them, anyway; the specifics of which languages are available and how language barriers are adjudicated are entirely up to the GM).
What languages can I plausibly offer the players? What languages, and how many, would it actually be sensible and worthwhile to offer the players? And then what kind of useful conclusions can I draw about languages in fantasy settings more broadly?
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COMMON LANGUAGES
“Common” means “shared,” but it also means “low,” “base,” or “vulgar” (“vulgar” itself being a bit of language terminology, originally referring to the “low” Latin of common people in the Roman Empire). In medieval Europe, the vast majority of speakers of these language are illiterate; it's possible that no written form of the language exists at all, and they certainly won't have any kind of “official” written form. There are wealthy and relatively powerful people who speak these languages, but they—the pre-Norman nobility, for instance—stand outside the new dominant hierarchy.
In the Mythic North, or any medieval quasi-Scotland, we have at least two common languages: English and Gaelic. The farther south you go, the more likely people are to speak English; south of the border, almost nobody speaks Gaelic. If English is your native language, Gaelic speakers probably reflexively mistrust you. The farther north you go, the more likely people are to speak Gaelic, and not far north of the border, there will be scarcely any native English speakers at all. If Gaelic is your native language, English speakers probably look down on you as being halfway savage.
This is a nice built-in engine of conflict. In a setting without outwardly obvious racial differences that people care about, this is the main vehicle for prejudice, whether negative or positive. Your characters are on one side or the other of this divide as soon as they open their mouths; everybody can tell (probably even if you're speaking another language entirely, just from your accent) whether you're Us or Them. It's also naturally balanced a bit in the Mythic North: In most of the setting's geographical area, English marks you as an unwelcome interloper, but in the one big city (where PCs might need to go to buy equipment, find work, hire retainers, etc.), Gaelic marks you as suspect (maybe a yokel, maybe a seditionist).
You might give players the choice of being a proper foreigner—German or Magyar or Italian—in which case they get a softer kind of negative prejudice from everybody; nobody sees them as Us, but nobody sees them as the most troublesome, acutely disliked Them. You might also expand the number of common languages: In 12th-century Scotland, for example, there were still native Cumbric speakers in the southwest (Hen Ogledd) and native Norse speakers in the far north. Doing so creates more work for you and more complexity for the players without much of a narrative gain, though. Maybe Gaelic speakers are better disposed toward Cumbric speakers than toward English speakers, but so what? It's not very different, outside of Hen Ogledd itself, from making the characters Irish (or Germans, Magyars, or Italians, for that matter). You can get as granular as you want, of course. Throw in Pictish, start breaking all five languages into dialects, etc. You just don't gain much beyond the first division, which ensures that, everywhere they go, the characters are either Us or some flavor of Them.
In any setting, having two different common languages in the campaign region creates affinities or the potential for conflict everywhere the player characters go. Having more than two common languages might be good for verisimilitude, but it doesn't really pay dramatic dividends, because in any one place and time, a language is fundamentally just marking you as some kind of Us (we ourselves, our kin, our allies) or some degree of Them (the enemy, the invader, the infidel, the stranger). It might shrink the area where any given character gets to be Us without making their home region a totally isolated island in a vast sea of Them, though.
ELITE LANGUAGES
These are shared languages among society's elite. Nobody who's a native of the campaign region speaks them as a first language (and perhaps nobody anywhere speaks them as a first language), but they are spoken by the authorities—in the case of the Mythic North, or pretty much any British setting post-Conquest, that's both the foreign lords who've conquered the realm and the clergy, foreign and native alike, who minister to it. Native people who have wealth, ambition, or unusual opportunities might have studied these languages; it's almost impossible to make the leap into the upper echelons of the rulers' society without knowledge of them.
There are exactly two of these in post-Conquest Britain: Latin, which is the language of the Church and most scholarship, and French, which is the language of court and of the Norman nobility more broadly. All clergy read, write, and speak Latin, and so does just about anybody with a good education. Not every noble does, but those with pretensions of being learned men or patrons of scholars surely do. Meanwhile, all nobles speak French, and nearly all of them read and write it as well. Anybody who deals with the nobility and their courts—many clergymen, lawyers, sheriffs, scribes, etc.—probably does too. Unlike the common languages, elite languages have at least semi-codified written forms (there's no Académie Française yet, but there are notions of what proper French is, and manuals for mastering it), and the elite are generally expected not only to read and write, but to do so well.
In a different context, of course (France itself, or somewhere like Switzerland or Aquitaine), French could be a common language too (and different forms or dialects of French could be common and elite in the same region). Latin has a more distinct position, as a kind of universal language across the entire European continent and as the working language of the Church (an institution that's usually hard to replace or recreate in trad fantasy settings). Unlike French, it's no community's native language, so speaking it with an accent, or even speaking it badly, doesn't necessarily mark you as an outsider in contexts where it's used.
A society ruled by foreign conquerors isn't going to feature in every setting, but it sure is a good premise for drama and intrigue (and there are lots of interesting historical examples to draw on: Arabic speakers in Iberia, Persian speakers in India, German speakers in the Baltics, Turkish speakers in the Balkans, French speakers all over the place). Likewise, you don't need the dead language of the bygone continent-spanning empire to remain in use as a vehicle for elite scholarship, international law, and religious organizations…but it's not a bad idea, right? A language with no native-speaker communities but that's widely used in elite (or professional) circles can also show up as the secret language of mages or alchemists, thieves' cant, the constructed language of a utopian society, etc.
ARCANE LANGUAGES
These are languages that people, at least in this setting, pretty much only know from books—but they're also the languages that a lot of the most important, informative, dangerous books are written in. Latin is similar in many ways (almost nobody learns it as a first language, and it's used more in writing than in speech), but it's also the working language of the Church, which gives it far greater importance than the others in mundane matters, but also makes it less mysterious. These are the languages of alchemical and hermetic texts, the languages of magic.
Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic all fall into this category in the context of medieval Europe. If there's a secret druidic language (and it isn't just Gaelic or Cumbric), it belongs here too. A generous GM will probably tilt things to make a PC's choice of one or more of these worthwhile. A preponderance of the musty old tomes they encounter should be in whatever arcane language(s) they know. Let them run into some Moorish travelers, some Norse warriors who speak a little Arabic or Greek from their travels, that sort of thing. Maybe let them take both Hebrew and Aramaic with a single pick.
In a setting less closely based on medieval Europe, arcane languages can come from distant foreign nations, from ancient civilizations, or from other planes of existence. They can be associated with divination, theurgy, and alchemy, as historical magical texts mostly were, but they can also cover advanced technology, demonology, psionics, kung fu, or whatever else you want.
EXOTIC LANGUAGES
This is pretty much anything else. For the Mythic North or a similar setting, Norse is probably the most sensible “exotic” choice (if it isn't a common language in some part of the campaign region, nor an arcane language written in magic runes or whatever); there are some Norse NPCs in the setting as written. As with making arcane languages useful outside of wizards' libraries, the GM should probably put a finger on the scale here. If a player took Italian, introduce some Italian mercenaries. If she took Hungarian, place a Magyar diplomat at court or wherever.
In a generic sense, this is usually just a catch-all category for “my player has a concept that doesn't quite match anything in the campaign area” (or maybe “my player is determined to be a special, exotic snowflake”). You probably want enough “important” languages (widely spoken common and elite languages, plus arcane languages particularly relevant to certain adventure sites, necessary to learn spells, or what have you) that your players can't just take all of them from the jump…but not too many more than that. The rest can fall into this exotic, mostly decorative category—icing on the worldbuilding cake. You let your players know these languages aren't going to be super important, but then you treat them to the occasional little encounter where they do matter.
