A story where every race speaks the same language is either very limited (in races or in geography), or very lacking in vision. Languages are a mark that defines a culture, and without languages, we can't communicate.

There are several different ways you can incorporate languages into your story. The easiest method is to use English (or whatever your native tongue is) throughout, but note when a character is speaking a language other than English. An example would be:

He looked up at me and muttered something in human. I glared at him, then turned to Kylsen. "What did he say?" I asked the gryphae in elmedyn.

Kylsen merely smiled. "He said he didn't think dragons should be traipsing around the village's grazing lands. You scare the sheep."

Cinder nodded. "Our sheep be very skittish," she said in her improving Shaharadi. "We don't want to lose them because you were too close."

"Humans," I growled in elmedyn. Kylsen chuckled.

"They're their own race," he stated reasonably in the gryphae tongue.

The above example includes four different languages: human, elmedyn, Shaharadi, and gryphae. The translations into English for all but the human tongue are actually written out, but they are marked with tags that inform the reader as to which language is being spoken. This is one of the simplest and most common means of using different languages within a story. Since this example is first-person, the languages the reader gets translations for are the languages the POV character (in this case, a female dragon named Sigourney) knows. The POV character is Shaharadi, so she should know her native tongue. It's somewhat choppy because the speaker (a human) doesn't know as much Shaharadi. The POV character also knows elmedyn and gryphae, so she can understand when the gryphae, Kylsen, uses those tongues. However, the POV character does not know human, so the translation for the words spoken in the human tongue are not written out. (Note: the human tongue, in this story, is actually a close approximation to English, but the native tongue in the story is Shaharadi, so the Shaharadi is written out in English, and the human tongue is not translated.)

To use this method, you simply need to name the language each character is using. Try to keep in mind which POV you are using, and who the POV character is at each point in the story in which you use a different language. For example, if the story is first person POV, you can only write out translations to the languages that the main character knows. If it is third person POV, you are limited to the languages that your "shoulder character" at that point knows. (If you don't know the terms I'm using, please see the POV Page.) Generally, language names come from a few common sources. They can be race languages (human, elven), country languages (German, Swedish), world languages (Terran, Martian), and caste (social class) languages (basic and pidgin versions of languages). There is no limit to what you call a language, but it helps if the name sounds like it could be spoken in that language. For example, our world as we know it has English, Deutsch (German), Russki (Russian, written phonetically), Espanől (Spanish), Français (French), Nihongo (Japanese, written phonetically), etc. Each language pronounces its own name in a way that comes directly from that language. Spanish people don't say druski to mean their language, and Russians don't say neciada to mean theirs (these are by no means actual words from those languages).

The next hardest means of using languages is to make up words that are supposed to be a different language, and use them occasionally in the story. This can range anywhere from single words to whole sentences and paragraphs. Usually, this is done using the phonetic alphabet, since most books aren't published using alphabets for non-phonetic (Roman) languages. When you do this, try to be consistent in the sounds of the language. Don't be gutteral one minute and fluid the next. Try to make the words sound like they're all from the same language.

A harder method is to invent an alphabet to go with the language. My raptori alphabet falls into this category. When you create an alphabet, you are more or less creating a code into which you will transcribe the sounds of the language. An example of an existing non-phonetic alphabet is the Cyrillic alphabet used for the Russian language. It consists of 33 letters, 31 of which are sounds. The remaining two are accent letters that later the way a word is pronounced. Every word in the Russian language is easy to spell, because letters don't modify each other's sounds by sitting next to each other, the way they are in English. There is no confusing in Russian with how to pronounce a word (unlike such English predicaments as enough, cough, bough and through). In the entire Cyrillic alphabet, there is no letter or combination for the sound th, but there is a combination for shch. When you make an alphabet, you want to match up sounds to recognizable symbols and strokes. If you want to cover most sounds available in the English language, use the International Phonetic Alphabet as your base alphabet. Raptori consists of 26 characters, and combining them in various ways creates sounds the same way one would create sounds like ng and ch in the English language. I try to be consistent in sound, and try to have, in basic translation, similar words mean similar things.

Some examples of raptori words are: