Hi sorry I've got a kind of convoluted question with regards to the language thing.
You said that characters would automatically hear things as though in their native tongue but how would that work if their native tongue was not normally the one used for a good part of the communication in-canon? To use Lord of the Rings as an example because it's complicated and dumb, nearly every distinct species has at least one language to its name (there's Dwarvish, at least three dialects of Elvish, way more than three regional dialects of Orcish, the Black Speech etc) HOWEVER the Lingua Franca for Middle Earth is Westron, and is almost always the language used for interspecies communication. This is part for the sake of practicality and part because some languages are super hard to learn - for example Dwarves actually go out of their way to make sure that nobody but Dwarves really learn how to speak Dwarvish/Khuzdul.
To make matters a little more complicated the Elves, at least, have a Lingua Franca among themselves on top of the basic interspecies communication default of Westron. Most elves when speaking among other elves use Sindarin, including the ones who are old enough that they originally spoke Quenya. Quenya, though technically their native language, is these days the Elvish equivalent of Latin, and has not been widely spoken for like six thousand years or so in-canon.
tl;dr my character's native language is a language he would not actually expect anyone outside other elves to understand unless they proved the spoke Elvish, but he also fluently speaks Westron, which is the default interacting-with-other-peoples-when-there'd-be-a-language-barrier language.
How... how would this work? Would he hear the language he expected to hear, and would his actual native tongue - which few would speak - still sound like a foreign language to those who didn't speak it when they heard it? Or would he be left doubletaking and confused at why suddenly all these people are communicating in Elvish? (or a language that's been dead for the past two and a half ages or their secret language that none must know or w/e w/e)
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You said that characters would automatically hear things as though in their native tongue but how would that work if their native tongue was not normally the one used for a good part of the communication in-canon? To use Lord of the Rings as an example because it's complicated and dumb, nearly every distinct species has at least one language to its name (there's Dwarvish, at least three dialects of Elvish, way more than three regional dialects of Orcish, the Black Speech etc) HOWEVER the Lingua Franca for Middle Earth is Westron, and is almost always the language used for interspecies communication. This is part for the sake of practicality and part because some languages are super hard to learn - for example Dwarves actually go out of their way to make sure that nobody but Dwarves really learn how to speak Dwarvish/Khuzdul.
To make matters a little more complicated the Elves, at least, have a Lingua Franca among themselves on top of the basic interspecies communication default of Westron. Most elves when speaking among other elves use Sindarin, including the ones who are old enough that they originally spoke Quenya. Quenya, though technically their native language, is these days the Elvish equivalent of Latin, and has not been widely spoken for like six thousand years or so in-canon.
tl;dr my character's native language is a language he would not actually expect anyone outside other elves to understand unless they proved the spoke Elvish, but he also fluently speaks Westron, which is the default interacting-with-other-peoples-when-there'd-be-a-language-barrier language.
How... how would this work? Would he hear the language he expected to hear, and would his actual native tongue - which few would speak - still sound like a foreign language to those who didn't speak it when they heard it? Or would he be left doubletaking and confused at why suddenly all these people are communicating in Elvish? (or a language that's been dead for the past two and a half ages or their secret language that none must know or w/e w/e)