Tamriel holds ten tongues and only one of them is common to all of it. Tamrielic is what the province does business in, every character speaks it and reads it, and it is never misheard. The other nine are older and belong to the races that carry them, and your character begins knowing the one they were raised in. You can be shut out of a conversation held in front of you, and you can put in the time to stop being shut out.
How it works
Your character is seeded with a racial tongue when they are made, at seventy-five percent, alongside Tamrielic at full. Nords get Nordic, Bretons Bretic, Redguards Yokudan, Orcs Orcish, High Elves Aldmeris, Wood Elves Bosmeri, Dark Elves Dunmeri, Khajiit Ta'agra and Argonians Jel. Imperials get no second tongue, because Tamrielic is already theirs.
Speech is all or nothing. At forty percent proficiency and above you understand a line in that tongue completely. Below it you understand none of it, and the whole line arrives as words of the right length drawn from that language's own word pool, so you can hear that somebody is speaking Dunmeri and you can hear how long the sentence was, and that is all you get. Tamrielic never corrupts for anybody.
Writing is graded word by word. Every word in a tongue carries its own difficulty, and against your proficiency it comes out clear, uncertain, or illegible. An uncertain word is swapped for a different word that looks like it belongs there, and you are not told which words were swapped. An illegible word is blanked out. A document you half know is more dangerous to you than one you cannot read at all, because it hands you a sentence that makes sense and is wrong.
The corruption is fixed. A given real word always becomes the same fake word in a given tongue, for every reader and every listener, in every message. Two people who heard the same untranslated line heard the same nonsense and can compare notes, and a player who meets a word often enough can learn what it means, the same way a character would.
You train a tongue by being around it. Hearing a language spoken trains it slowly and reading a document written in it trains it faster, and both are governed so that standing in a tavern doing nothing trains nothing. Hearing has a cooldown between lines, a daily limit per tongue, and a ceiling at seventy percent, past which only reading will take you further. Reading awards you once per document per day and only after the document has been open long enough for its length, so parking in a book earns one award and no more.
Reading and writing anything at all needs Speech 10. Below that your character is illiterate, every document shows as blanked-out text including the Tamrielic ones, and the readout says so. Speaking and hearing are never gated on literacy, so an illiterate character talks and understands as normal. Speech itself never grants you a tongue. It is the literacy gate and a small multiplier on how fast you train, and nothing else.
Your active tongue lasts for the session only. Every login starts you back on Tamrielic, so speaking Dunmeri in a Dunmer household is something you choose again each time you sit down rather than something you set once and forget you left on.
Every line spoken in a tongue other than Tamrielic is marked with that tongue's name in brackets beside the speaker, for the speaker and for everyone who recognizes it. If you have no proficiency in it at all you see [Unknown] instead, so you know somebody is speaking something without knowing what. Tamrielic carries no mark.
All in-character speech goes through this: say, low, whisper, shout and tell (see The Voice of Aurbis). Out-of-character, global and narrator channels bypass it entirely, and you always see your own words as you said them.
What you write at a scribe's desk is written in the tongue you were speaking, and it is rendered for each reader against that reader's proficiency in it (see Literacy, Scribes, and Written Works).
There is no teaching command yet. A fluent speaker cannot hand a tongue to somebody else, so a tongue is learned by being spoken to and by reading. We will add teaching.
Commands (/help language)
/lang shows your active tongue and the proficiencies you have./lang list does the same./lang <name> switches the tongue your in-character speech uses for the rest of the session. You need forty percent in it to switch./nordic <text> speaks a single line in Nordic without switching your active tongue./aldmeris <text> speaks a single line in Aldmeris./dunmeri <text> speaks a single line in Dunmeri./bosmeri <text> speaks a single line in Bosmeri./taagra <text> speaks a single line in Ta'agra./jel <text> speaks a single line in Jel./yokudan <text> speaks a single line in Yokudan./orcish <text> speaks a single line in Orcish./bretic <text> speaks a single line in Bretic./tamrielic <text> speaks a single line in Tamrielic, which always works.
A one-shot needs the same forty percent the switch needs.
