In my world there was no Babel, there was no separating of previously united cultures and there are no different languages. I work this in so that the people of our world can understand and be understood without any real trouble but here are some thoughts. Suppose there are people far from any other previous grouping. What do they call the area your people are from? If a creature was discovered and named by another group what is it called? From the beginning of the world how many different names should there be for one thing? Just something to consider. Even within languages there would logically be differences in dialects.

Okay, discuss!

~RinJaz

In Sorrven; every race had their own name for animals, but later when they discovered they needed a common tongue (as the scientists use Latin, or Rome used... roman??? That can't be right... anyway...). Then they started using the names of the beasts in the common speech.

When you look at English, you notice some things have more than one name, say, pail/bucket or hazelnut/filbert or mountain lion/puma/cougar. Perhaps there would be a couple of names for the item, but most people for trade and other reasons of communication would know what everyone meant. If the distance was too great, perhaps it would be like US/UK/Australian differences where some people might not have heard the word before, but would just laugh at the discrepancy. (Example: trunk/boot of a car)

Areas that are far away and don't have much contact with others would probably have stronger accents and more vocabulary that doesn't match, because language is something living that changes as people add new words and forget others. People from very different regions might have initial trouble understanding each other, but share grammar and common roots for their words. However, if they had a writing system, that would slow down the process of divergence, since they'd have documents to compare it to.

Perhaps two very distant cultures could have melted far enough away so the difference is almost an entirely new language, like Portuguese/Spanish and other Latin languages. The difference doesn't have to be so great, it could just be basically the same language with different forms of writing such as Uighur/Uzbek. (And if you have actually heard of those languages, A+ for you!)

Those are languages? *Laughs out loud*

Moved to Scriptorium.

Latin was the language of Ancient Rome.

Oh, thank you!