Regions & Languages Tool
The Regions & Languages tool is mainly used in two ways: for Character Creation and for NPCs interactions.
Character Creation
During character creation, you will choose (or roll) a region and a realm or tribe. This tool will provide you with the details about the society, pantheon, native language, and its associated scripts for a given region and realm.
For example (see below) if your character is from Emélrenè and rolled Beréma Shire as their birth realm, they would speak Emélan, which is a language of the Járind family. If they know a script it would likely be Lakíse, and if they select a second language then Pálithàner or the Palgánin dialect of the Tríerzi language would offer a regional bonus.
And since the native language is of the Járind family, choosing a second language within that family gives a same-family boost. You can see the list of eligible languages in the family on the right.
If there are multiple native languages available, they will be displayed below the first one. Some have 3 such options for native languages.
The D means it's a dialect, the dialect comes after the language, separated by a -.
All this information becomes particularly relevant when it's time to allocate skill development points to languages or scripts. In step 12 of character creation, you can select additional languages in the following part of the development window and you need to look up if you can have either a regional or a family boost.
So let's say you are creating a character from the Orbáal Kingdom, you see that his native language is Orbáaler and that the regional languages that he has boosts for are Járin and Hârnic. You can also see Hârnic in the same-family boosts on the right
The languages and scripts choices for that character might look something like this.
NPCs Interaction
Another use of the this tool is when a player character encounters a NPC and language might be an issue. Say one of your PC named Tovâr, who is a scholar from Chélemby, arrives at a port in Orbáal on Hârn. Tovâr wants to ask a longshoreman for directions. Tovâr speaks Chéler with a ML of 63. First you set the language that Tovâr speaks in the lower left part of the tool.
Then you select the Hârn region and the Orbáal realm. This tells you that the longshoreman speaks Orbáaler, which is a language that Tovâr does not have a skill for.
But this also shows that there is mutual intelligibility between their respective languages. The longshoreman has M3 for Tovâr's Chéler while Tovâr has M2 for Orbáaler. Looking at the table on the right we see that a longshoreman probably has a language index of 3-5, so with M3 mutual intelligibility this would bring the index down to 0-2 for a rather limited conversation if they were to speak Chéler.
On the other hand Tovâr has an index of 6 so M2 brings it down to 4. We see that Tovâr can express himself in Orbáaler just as well as the longshoreman, but probably with a noticeable accent (depending on ELO, see page 77). Tovâr can start asking his questions without a problem!