$Revision: 1.8 $

Languages are pretty hard to do "right" in a RPG.
The interplay between written, spoken, history and culture makes very difficult to properly model any language proficiency. A native Italian speaker could have a good grasp of Portuguese, for example, if he (or she) happens to come from a given Italian region, while someone else who lives no more than 100 Km apart could make himself understood in French with a minimal effort, and yet being completely unable to write in French...

I have no intention to even try to "do it right"... especially because I think that Silhouette is a system that works best at an abstract level of detail. I will provide guidelines on where the various languages were used in the '30s, and also offer some "light" guidelines on how someone speaking a language would fare when trying to use a different one.

The basis for this work will be a table listing language, area of the world in which it is used, and then listing "sibling" languages in decreasing order of similarity.

Someone who knows a language listed in the first table column will automatically get the following abilities:

Fairly Close

Roll as per the language you know, applying a -2 to the roll.

Somewhat close

Roll as per the language you know, applying a -3 to the roll.

Distantly related

Unskilled roll. (remember that you are entitled to your KNO bonus if the result is not a fumble).

Written forms of a given language will follow more or less the same principle, but the GM should note that in some cases knowing one of the two will not automatically help the character to be proficient in another: for example someone who is able to write and read Egyptian hyerogliphs could be at a loss trying to speak to a reanimated mummy... or someone who learned Japanese by associating with an old martial arts master could be completely unable to write or read kanji...

Introducing a defaulting mechanism (e.g. Danish defaults at Swedish -2) may result in side effects: what if someone wants to learn both Swedish and Danish? If he has Swedish-3, why should he spend the full cost to get Danish-1, for example?
The GM could obviously decide beforehand that defaulting languages are "free" up to their default, so someone having Swedish-3 may learn Danish-2 by just spending the 4 points required, even if he never bought Danish- 1 before.
Be careful because this could cause some extra checks and calculations whenever the player decides to learn an extra language.