I'm sure this must have come up before at some point, but I am trying to figure out 'good' ways of dealing with Languages in Mythic Europe.
I am the main storyteller in a long-standing group and our old Campaign just ended our new one beginning. Our old game was set in Devon, so we had only a limited number of languages to worry about; everybody basically spoke Norman French, 'English', Welsh or Cornish, with of course Latin and a few strays here and there.
Our new game is Set in Venice, and this has posed a whole host of difficulties. Besides the plethora of languages that exist in the surrounding area even if one 'fudges'(Greek, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Croat-Serbian, Arabic) there is the issue of how to deal with both the languages of Italy and the Languages of Germany without it becoming unruly. The two competing issues are at heart 'accuracy', in which the diversity of languages on the Italian peninsula seems in this era to be pretty expansive, and making Languages an empty point sink wherein the guy who speaks Greek, Arabic, Venetian and Some Variant of Russian has spent the same point as SOme-one who speaks Venetian, Tuscan, Lombard and Sicilian.
So two questions really; The first have someone done a reasonably division of languages for the Region?
Two, how have people handled languages, any interesting rules variants I might bolt into my game. I've been toying with an idea such that related languages offer cost breaks and/or default to related tongues, but I'm interested in what other people have done.