Languages, Literacy, and Scripts

How do other people on this board handle spoken and written languages?

The RAW say each language is a single skill, and (in the BGB) each written language is a different instance of the Literacy skill. One GM I respect gave all of us a single "Languages" skill; a skill check determined whether we understand whatever is being spoken. IIRC we only rolled when encountering someone from/in another country. Lamentations of the Flame Princess (Old School D&D) goes a step further; a check of their Languages skill determines whether you speak a specific language or not; players maintain a list of languages they can speak and another list of languages they definitively can't, but you clear the latter list when you gain a level.

For that matter, how often do you make a language check? I remember one Murphy's Rules mocked RQ3 for giving beginning characters a low chance to say anything in their mother tongue. (The caption was something like "Grbsh Smrzl, Mom and Dad!") Do you check every time someone begins speaking? Every statement? And what about dialects which are somewhat intelligible?

And then there's the rules on reading and writing. Is literacy in Spanish so different from literacy in Italian? It's the same Roman letters, with a few extra diacritical marks and slightly different pronunciation rules? For that matter I learned the Greek alphabet in about a week in high school; I sucked at grammar and vocabulary, but given a Classical Greek text at least I knew what sounds to make.

FWIW, my own readings on linguistics have led me to the following semi-realistic approach:

1. Somewhat unrealistically, we'll categorize each form of speech as either a dialect or a language. This is distinct from the "official" designation; Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are mutually intelligible "languages" while the "dialects" of Chinese are related only by the writing system (which is essentially a transcription of Mandarin).
   
   
2. Each language is a distinct skill, as in the RAW. Each dialect defaults to half a related dialect/language (maybe more or less if we want to quantify relationships), but characters can train them up just like any other skill.
   
   
3. Literacy may be a single skill or a simple yes/no question (as in modern times). Literate characters can usually read any language they can speak, using the lower of the Literacy skill (if any) and the spoken language skill.
   
   
4. The written language counts as a separate skill from the spoken language if it's not a straightforward phonetic transcription, e.g. Chinese characters or English spelling. The written language may count as a completely separate language (e.g. Japanese) or a "dialect" (e.g. English, French, or any other language where spelling and pronunciation have drifted apart.)
   

Certain languages may have unique rules. For example, some languages have no written form, or at least none used by native speakers. If they later encounter a written form invented by another culture they may have to take it as a separate skill; alternatively, if (say) someone invents a way of writing Cimmerian in Elvish letters someone who already knows (written) Elvish would pick it up for free.

A similar situation occurs if the same language switches alphabets, e.g. Turkish switching from Arabic to Roman letters. Anyone who writes/speaks Arabic and speaks Turkish could read older documents using Turkish-in-Arabic-Letters. Or perhaps the new written form is straightforward enough to anyone who groks the concept of reading, like Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics apparently were to the Native American tribes they were invented for.

In medieval Japan, women and other minimally-educated people could write Japanese phonetically using hiragana characters. Truly educated men, on the other hand, used the more complicated mixture of Chinese characters (kanji) and hiragana in use today. In our system, then, literate Japanese speakers get hiragana writing for free, but need to learn Kanji with a different skill.

Maybe the language is dead, so that all we have is the written form. The spoken language is a scholar's reconstruction. Should a native speaker return from death, the stars, or an alternate world, he might hear the conventional spoken form as an incredibly bizarre dialect.

Other fantasy languages might have a logographic written form that normally counts as a second skill, but (as in the myth about Chinese) a whole group of languages use the exact same written form. Anyone writing in one of those languages can be read by anyone who speaks one of those languages and knows how to read the logograms. In a fantasy world I'm working on, Aklo has separate skills for speaking and writing, but since it's the language of sorcery all characters who start as sorcerers receive Aklo Logograms at the same skill level as the spoken language. Other non-human creatures write Aklo the same way but speak Aklo according to their vocal apparatus, so there's different skills for Human Spoken Aklo, Ghoul Howled Aklo, Elder Thing Piping Aklo, Mi-Go Colour-Change-and-Buzz Aklo ...

I have stopped making separate Language/Literacy rolls and instead the Language/Literacy as a cap when using other skills. Most of the skills in the Communication category would apply to this. For example a player have 80% in Bargain but only 40% in Dwarvish. He wants to haggle with a Dwarf to buy a very nice battle axe. Since his skill in Dwarven is lower than his Bargain it limits the Bargain roll to the same skill level as his Language. So he has to make his Bargain with a skill of 40% instead. If he passes the skill roll he gets experience rolls in both Dwarvish and Bargain.

I do the same thing with Literacy skill. This way to handle the Language/Literacy skills saves me a lot of headache but still keeps the Language/Literacy skills important.

I have stopped making separate Language/Literacy rolls and instead the Language/Literacy as a cap when using other skills. Most of the skills in the Communication category would apply to this. For example a player have 80% in Bargain but only 40% in Dwarvish. He wants to haggle with a Dwarf to buy a very nice battle axe. Since his skill in Dwarven is lower than his Bargain it limits the Bargain roll to the same skill level as his Language. So he has to make his Bargain with a skill of 40% instead. If he passes the skill roll he gets experience rolls in both Dwarvish and Bargain.

I do the same thing with Literacy skill. This way to handle the Language/Literacy skills saves me a lot of headache but still keeps the Language/Literacy skills important.

Brilliant!

Rod

The simple rule I use is that each language is a different specialty, but once you know a language of a "family" you can speak another one at a penalty. Most Alepthar supplements have a relationship table for related languages.

Literacy skills I consider linked to alphabets instead. Your literacy skill in the Latin alphabet is used for all languages that use it (diacriticals are usually just a nuisance when it comes to understanding, even when they change the meaning of a word you usually get it from the context), but it is limited by the language skill. If you do not know Turkish, your literacy (Latin) will not help you in any way. Assuming you have Italian at 80% and Literacy (Latin) at 70%, and that the GM allows you to treat Spanish as Difficult Italian roll, your 40% Spanish will limit your ability to read a Spanish document. Which is quite fair, I assure you, as it corresponds roughly to my ability to read Spanish when I was first confronted with a Spanish spec document having never studied Spanish.

Linking literacy to alphabets has also the useful side effects of making things more complicate when a language uses more than one alphabet, as in the Japanese example above. Some of these complications may appear in the forthcoming BRP Steppes supplement, as some nomads used different alphabets for the phonetic transcription of their languages over time, but I do not know how far we wish to go as very few nomad PCs will be literate.

EDIT: Here' I'm talking about the standard fantasy/historical/modern/science-fiction world, where everyone in the same country or region uses the same alphabet. It sounds like a skill per writing system might be necessary in BRP Steppes where everyone knows Mongolian but the few literate people are divided over Uyghur vs. hPhags-pa vs. Latin vs. Cyrillic.

While I agree that categorizing reading ability by alphabet/syllabary/whatever makes more sense, in most cases I don't see the need for a skill for each writing system unless said system is complicated. Something like Japanese Kanji or Chinese Hanzi would need a skill, certainly, and Sumerian Cuneiform, even in its latter syllabic stages, looks horribly complex. On the other hand, the current Latin alphabet has 26 letters, Greek 24, Arabic 28; even adding diacritical marks used in Latin-based alphabets or extensions to Arabic's vowel system that's still not a lot to remember. Converting those 26 letters + marks to sounds is fairly straightforward in most languages, English being a glaring exception. Even Japanese Kana -- hiragana and katakana -- is forty-eight basic forms and two marks that change, for example, HA to BA or PA. That's why I treat alphabets and simple syllabaries like kana as on-off switches, not skills: either you learned it or you don't, and if you're literate and learned the language you probably did.

Then again, dealing with languages in a game in even a semi-realistic fashion is not fun: if you don't know the language or flub your die roll, you don't get the information or ally you need. (There's a reason why sci-fi movies and TV assume that everyone in the galaxy speaks English.) That's why I find the LotFP solution or my former GM's single skill so appealing. I also envy systems like GURPS or some D&D versions in which languages have four levels: can't speak, speaks badly, speaks adequately, speaks like a native. In BRP, the "speaks badly" condition might indicate a Difficult roll to communicate, and "speaks like a native" is required to blend in.

BTW, two sites I've found very helpful in understanding writing systems are Ancient Scripts and Omniglot. Wikipedia's linguistic articles are also quite good, although I'm sure they'd make an actual linguist apoplectic.

Hardly ever bother with this. I use just one skill - "Language" - to cover all languages known. Saves clogging up the character-sheet with many (mostly unused) percentages. Languages learned this year give "Very Difficult" rolls (1/10th skill), and ones within 1-2 years are Difficult (x1/2). Similarly for Literacy (which covers the normal scripts of any languages known). [Languages of special significance, such as cult ones, can be listed separately and increased as normal].

I give all characters Own Language (INTx5%) which assumes literacy as well as spoken skills. I limit all Communication skills by this as a ceiling score, unless the player characters provide an explanation otherwise. For ancient/medieval/fantasy settings I have Literacy as a separate skill, usually starting at Literacy, Own (INT x1%) for Middle Class characters, increasing by a step (x1%) for each social class above, and anything below Middle Class doesn't start with Literacy at all (although I often allow a INTx5% roll for basic symbols, such signage, often pictorial). In these settings I tend to like Literacy to be a specialised skill, but in modern settings the focus is different.

EDIT: Here' I'm talking about the standard fantasy/historical/modern/science-fiction world, where everyone in the same country or region uses the same alphabet. It sounds like a skill per writing system might be necessary in BRP Steppes where everyone knows Mongolian but the few literate people are divided over Uyghur vs. hPhags-pa vs. Latin vs. Cyrillic.

Many settings use different alphabets. In Middle Earth, Elvish uses a different alphabet to Dwarvish, for example. In the world there are many different alphabets, often quite close together, even historically. In a D&D-style setting, the alignment languages would be in different alphabets.

So the standard setting would probably have multiple alphabets.

While I agree that categorizing reading ability by alphabet/syllabary/whatever makes more sense, in most cases I don't see the need for a skill for each writing system unless said system is complicated. Something like Japanese Kanji or Chinese Hanzi would need a skill, certainly, and Sumerian Cuneiform, even in its latter syllabic stages, looks horribly complex. On the other hand, the current Latin alphabet has 26 letters, Greek 24, Arabic 28; even adding diacritical marks used in Latin-based alphabets or extensions to Arabic's vowel system that's still not a lot to remember. Converting those 26 letters + marks to sounds is fairly straightforward in most languages, English being a glaring exception. Even Japanese Kana -- hiragana and katakana -- is forty-eight basic forms and two marks that change, for example, HA to BA or PA. That's why I treat alphabets and simple syllabaries like kana as on-off switches, not skills: either you learned it or you don't, and if you're literate and learned the language you probably did.

I agree that knowledge of an alphabet is quite straightforward. If you know Cyrillic then you can probably read most Cyrillic-based languages, the only problem with them is the extra letters for different languages.

However, reading is by no means understanding. I can understand very little Serbo-Croat, for example, unless it is similar to Russian. I can read and pronounce Bashkort, but can only understand one or two words.

That is why I use a different skill for each language and have the ability to read in a particular alphabet.

Then again, dealing with languages in a game in even a semi-realistic fashion is not fun: if you don't know the language or flub your die roll, you don't get the information or ally you need. (There's a reason why sci-fi movies and TV assume that everyone in the galaxy speaks English.) That's why I find the LotFP solution or my former GM's single skill so appealing. I also envy systems like GURPS or some D&D versions in which languages have four levels: can't speak, speaks badly, speaks adequately, speaks like a native. In BRP, the "speaks badly" condition might indicate a Difficult roll to communicate, and "speaks like a native" is required to blend in.

I finds that it enhances fun in play.

Mechanics aside, how do people portion out languages in their actual campaigns? I can think of a few patterns:

1. D&D: there's a "Common" language which nearly everyone speaks, and a bunch of languages specialized by species, religion, "alignment", or subculture. This implies a huge Empire imposed its language on the known world(s), but monsters, barbarians, isolated regions, and secret cabals retained their own. Most SF games take this approach.

2. Nation-states: each of several large regions or nations has its own language. The players come from one such region, and have no problem communicating within it. Cross the border into enemy territory, though, and you'll need to know the language.

3. Balkanized: different cultures with their own languages are intermixed, or at least live within walking distance of each other. Travelers need to know several languages just to get by. This seems to describe Glorantha, from what I know. It also resembles medieval and early modern Europe, for which James Raggi devised the Languages Skill mechanic in LotFP.

Each of these is a matter of degree or scale, and one can mix and match.

• Tolkien resembles a mixture of 1 and 2: the world of Men speaks one language or a few closely related ones, given how easily the Shire folk communicated in Gondor and understood the Mordor Orcs, but Elves and Dwarves are still powerful nations, and the greatest war machine on Middle-Earth speaks Black Speech.
  
• A LotFP campaign I've yet to pull the trigger on assumes a powerful empire conquered other peoples but fell to other conquerors; everyone speaks the original language of the region, educated and powerful people speak the Empire's language, and wizards and priests speak the language of their school or liturgy.
  
• A Magic World game I'm planning now assumes a similar "fallen empire" setup. There's one Common language with multiple semi-intelligible dialects, including Old Imperial. Non-humans creatures (a minority) have their own languages ... but so do the "barbarians" to the North, traders from the South, and assorted human pagans/traditionalists spread across the former Empire.
  

In my current fantasy campaign world I am working on each culture has it's own language. On top of that I have a regional language for the northern part of the world and one for the southern part of the world. Still haven't decided if I should put in a Common language. It would make it easier for the players but at the same time I feel that having the regional/cultural languages as barriers does provide an interesting challenge and flavor and reward the players who drop skill points into other languages.

In a previous Weird West campaign we had some very interesting encounters when they where trying to communicate with Native Americans. When the language wasn't enough there was a lot of drawing pictures in ground. Which was very fun one time when communicating with a Shaman who was trying to tell them of a supernatural creature from the Aces High Monograph being a big head with ears as wings and large enough to carry fully grown cattle. They could hardly believe the pictures the shaman was drawing.

My fantasy games are usually set in Glorantha, so I tend to use a mixture of the Balkanised model and the nation-states model. In my settings, Spoken language starting chance varies according to culture, and written language according to social class. Characters begin with Language (Own) at INTx5% for Civilised characters, INTx4% for those of Barbarian cultures, and INTx3% for those of Primitive origin. Literacy (Own) varies according to social class: Destitute/Urchin/Slave doesn't start with any skill in Literacy; Poor starts at INT%; Middle Class at INTx2%; and Upper Class at INTx3%. I also give most characters Language (Tradetalk) at INTx2%, which is the unifying tongue in Glorantha, although from what I know it a mixture of traders argot and hand gestures, rather than just a vocal language in the usual sense. Its not so much a 'common' dialect, but more a back up form of communication for most. As social skills are limited by the language skill, then it is always handy to have a merchant or sage type character in a Gloranthan troupe to act as a linguist, and it should be pointed out that Tradetalk has no written form, so having someone versed in literacy in quite handy. It might seem cumbersome to some, but it adds to the flavour of an ancient/fantasy setting to highlight cultural differences, and different languages are part of this.

I use a different skill for (spoken) language and for script. And then the lowest skill caps the other one. EG: if you have Russian 80% but Cyrillic 30%, I consider 30% when you try to read Russian. I think it's sort-of realistic yet still quite simple.

Mechanics aside, how do people portion out languages in their actual campaigns? I can think of a few patterns:

In Mythic Earth, I use something similar to Balkanised, in that languages are by region or by people. Some languages are similar to others, some are not. So, French, Occitan and Catalan are similar, as are Spanish and Catalan, but none are similar to Tartar. The Tartars of the Crimea and the Tartars of Kitay speak virtually the same language, and so on. Greek, Tartar and French are common languages at various times.

In Glorantha, many cultures speak similar languages, so someone should be able to speak with someone who lives nearby. However, different cultures have different languages, so someone living a couple of miles away might speak a completely different language. Tradetalk is a common language for everyone.

For what it is worth, my interpretation of how to apply percentiles to actual play languages is as follows:

Language/Literacy is used to determine how much technical language or jargon that can be interpreted by the speaker/reader. For a more coherent example, if a person had Language: American at 30% they could likely get by, would use improper grammar and sentence structure (For examples; my personal pet peeve of corporate memes: 'I'm lovin' it', or using 'Me and Billy' rather than 'Billy and I', or not understanding the difference between there, their, and they're. Or you can get more stereotypical and apply jargons similar to the deep woods hick, that may slur or muddle words, running them together.). Where as someone with a Language: American at 85% would be able to orally discuss complex terms such as medical jargon, technical terms and polysyllabic adjectives/synonyms, etc. (For example, a character may not be understand what 'acute command psychotic confabulation' means unless they make a Language roll. However, if the player does not make the roll, they can ask the speaker to give it in layman's terms, or dumb it down, and would be able to understand that the statements means 'short, time-limited hallucinations that provide direct orders or directions to the hallucinatee that often come as a result of creating a back story or reading into events that is neither accurate or reasonable for the person to do so'.).

Literacy is just the reading version of my language rules, except without the ability to ask the speaker to drop the technical jargon. By making their Literacy roll regarding technical jargon, the player can then get the rough idea through context clues.

In the world I am working on, there are derivations of language that provide some bonus to other languages based on skill. A real world example would be if you know French, you can understand a bit of Creole, same if you know American, you get another bit of Creole. However, if you know both, this does not mean that you understand Creole perfectly, as there is a lot of jargon and slang. Mechanically I would say if you have the main line language (American or French) above 50% then you would get a 5% bonus to Language: Creole (and a 10% bonus if you have both American and French at +50%). It also works in reverse and if the character comes from a Creole dominated area, and they have over 50% in Language: Creole, then they would receive the +5% bonus to both Language: American and Language: French. However, this does NOT work with Literacy in my mind. But I also keep a list of languages that do not have written forms, and for simplicity's sake for my game world, the derived languages do not have literacy equivalents (but then again I am running a fantasy world where literacy is a fairly rare skill as is).

It depends on the type of game. Right now I'm running Ravenloft, and 20% lets you communicate fine as well as get by in reading. I also hand out Language skill points like candy because I want to encourage a lot of different languages floating around the table.

In stricter games or games where there is a monolanguage and some minor other languages floating around I make things more difficult. It could also be fun to run a game in which writing was a plot point and restricted to hte educated class, but that's not a game that I've actually run before. No split for language and literacy here.

I have stopped making separate Language/Literacy rolls and instead the Language/Literacy as a cap when using other skills.

I do something similar on occasion. Rather than a cap, I use one roll to determine how the character did on both skills. He may have crited his Bargain but fumbled his Language. Then the fun part is how you want to read the roll.

For a more coherent example, if a person had Language: American at 30% they could likely get by, would use improper grammar and sentence structure

They would also be able to speak to various people around the world, as American is spoken in many different countries.

They would also be able to speak to various people around the world, as American is spoken in many different countries.

Absolutely, American is spoken by a great number of people in a great number of places. It makes languages, such as American, far more useful than say Tagalong, depending on where you are geographically that is. However, I tend to lean to the more 'gritty'/'simulationist' side of the of the spectrum so I tend to get nit-picky about such things. That is why it is important for the GM of a similar bent, assuming they are taking the position that Languages are an important skill in their campaign, to have an understanding of who speaks what and where, what languages have roots in what other languages, which alphabets are predicated on the same shapes and ad nauseam . However, there is nothing wrong with games where everyone from the noblest of courtesans to the loin cloth swaddled pygmies of the darkest jungles all speaking 'Common' if that is the way the group and GM like to run. But that then circles back to the core point of this thread, at least in my eyes, which is: language is more about eloquence than actual communication. Bartering and rudimentary exchange of ideas can occur between two strangers without any words at all, and it is the role of the Language skill to dictate to what degree the participants can invoke higher levels of concepts such as persuasion, logic, emotional pleas, density and accuracy of information transfer, etc.

I suppose it is one heck of a climb on a precarious soap box to distribute a few cents, but meh.