Familiar dialects

Uh, not really. There are some drastic similarities to the two. Especially when being spoken. And there is a large quantity of words that the two languages share.

They’re crazy similar when written, but sound nothing alike when spoken, except for the words that happen to overlap completely.

Not really. But alright.

They’re pretty similar to somebody who doesn’t speak one or the other (…or both). And then there are languages like Swedish and Danish that border on being mutually intelligible. And then there are languages like Chinese where the different dialects within the language actually [i:3672maoc]aren’t[/i:3672maoc] mutually intelligible… but that gets far more into it than we need to. Let’s assume for simplicity’s sake that all Zabrak speak the exact same dialect of the same language whether they were raised on a colony world or on Iridonia or wherever.

That being said, the only way I can see to simulate this would be to assign each language a numeric value and a class. The numeric value would reflect the complexity of the language, such as how many exceptions it has to common rules. Languages like English would have a high value. Languages like Spanish would be much lower. This of course requires a lot of speculation about Star Wars languages, since little information is given on them. Togruta is a lot like Basic, according to Wookieepedia, so give it a low number. Something like Miralukese, a species with a fairly isolationist society, would probably have a very unique language, so their number would likely be higher.

As for the class, the simplest way to do that would simply be to divide the galaxy up by geographic regions. Assume languages in the "west" quadrant of the outer rim are similar, deep-core languages are similar, etc. Of course this likely wouldn’t be ‘true’, but you could divide it up other ways. Put insectoid languages together, amphibian languages, etc. That would probably be more accurate.

Languages that ought to be instantly recognizable, such as Wookiee, can be given an extremely high number and assigned an individual language class.

Then, in order to work out how difficult it is to recognize a language, determine whether or not you already know a language in that class fluently. If you don’t, you simply use the number of the language. The higher the number (the more complex and distinct the language is) the easier it is, so the fewer times you’d need to hear it. If you already know a language in that class, you get a multiplier to that number. It’s easier to recognize Spanish if you know Italian.

Then increase the number you need to hear everytime you hear somebody speaking the language if you wouldn’t expect them to speak it. Of course, this system can be easily adapted to allow small portions of languages you don’t speak that are similar to languages you do speak to be understood.

[b:3672maoc]If you didn’t bother to read all that, at least read this:[/b:3672maoc]

My point is this: We’re getting way off track and making this far more complicated than it needs to be. Ravaus’ suggestion of getting confused when you hear a Bothan speak Iktotchi is probably slightly more in-depth than we need, but it’s feasible. But all this arguing about how similar or dissimilar Portuguese and Spanish are is pointless.

Language classes effect how we learn language in the real world, but it’s not a feature that would ever be obvious enough from the player side to be appreciated, and it would be a huge waste of time.

TL;DR: Recognizing languages you don’t speak? Awesome. Fussing about which ones would be easy and which would be hard? Probably a waste of time and effort.

But then you run into the problem of different languages having different difficulties based on your native language.

It’s easier for a Swede to learn Norwegian than a Czech trying to learn Quechua.

So yeah.. I’d say every use of a language by the race the language comes with by default. And maybe basic always, too, since basic looks different when it’s spoken and you don’t understand it.