The default skill level for a language is Terrible, not Poor like other skills. This means it takes 2 raises to reach Poor, not 1. This has no effect on languages purchased through the 5 point system but does effect languages learned through the College and Military backgrounds.

Time for Language Acquisition
For every 400 hours of study with a teacher the character gets 1 raise. If the character does not have a teacher the time goes to 1600 hours per raise.
If in a location where the language is spoken natively and trying to learn the language a character automatically gets the equivalent of 4 hours of study per day and is assumed to be learning with a teacher (the entire local population). Spending 100 days in the country = 1 raise. Languages can only be raised to Fair in this manner, higher than that requires actual study not just being around native speakers. This works out to 1 year to acquire fluency when stuck in some native village.

Language Skill Levels Skill Level

Level of Speech/Understanding	Notes
Terrible	Child speak	Simple phrases, Hello, good bye.
Poor	Broken sentences	Things that make sense but are wrong and may lead to confusion: How does I turned waters on?
Mediocre	Accented	Defiantly a foreigner, or from an isolated rural, or lower class, but can get by.
Fair	Native	Most people on the street speak at this level. Most are functionally literate in modern countries.
Good	Educated	Can fake regional accents passably well and does not use one unless desired. Everyone at this level is literate.
Great	Exceptional	Understands complex phrases: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo without having to look them up.
Superb	Scholarly	Can discuss the sentence above, note alternate meanings, and discuss its parsing at length.

Communicating in Related Languages
When trying to communicate in a language the character does not know, start with something they know and count the total steps to the other language. Reduce the character level by 1 for each step. So for a Fair English speaker trying to communicate in German its 4 steps (Anglo-Frisian -> Western Germanic -> Old High German -> German). Reducing Fair to below Terrible, nothing is understood or communicated. An English speaker with Good English however reduced by 4 can understand German at a Terrible level, and probably say Good Morning. This does not mean that the speaker knows German, but can ask simple common questions and understand basic answers at that level. If the communication goes much beyond 'where is the bathroom" the character needs to have purchased the language to communicate with speakers. With a dictionary the character can read the language at the level determined (but not write it). A character with the Linguistics Skill can apply its bonus to any rolls made.

Reading Unrelated Languages
Assuming the character has access to an appropriate dictionary make a roll using the characters Linguistic Skill should be made. A character gets a +1 bonus for each language he knows at Superb. Characters lacking a Linguistics Skill are out of luck.

Deciphering Unknown Scripts:
When confronted with an unknown language in a new script (knowing any language with the same script, even from a different family negates this whole problem) the character should make a roll with the Cryptology skill to decipher the script. There maybe some bonus or negative depending on the kind of script and what the character knows. Linguistics be added here to if the script is similar to a known one, or the language is known but the script isn't (say some one wrote English with Cyrillic), but some things are just impossible (See the indicipherables at the bottom).

Deciphering Unknown Languages:
Once the script is known the character with Linguistics can attempt to decipher a completely unknown and unrelated to a known language. 1st make a linguistics roll to determine the family. Now go find a dictionary of a related language and use Reading Unrelated Languages. If that isn't possible your really out of luck on any short time span. Longer time spans, make successive rolls for each word, each successful roll = 1 point, each failed roll = -10 points. The character needs 100 points to read the text in question. If the text isn't long enough to get 100 points the best solution is more texts. When the character gets to -100 they produce a result, completely wrong but they are sure they understand the text.

Really useful stuff to know
The gods are from cultures that mainly spoke Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Aramaic, and Old Norse.
The bad guys will often know Latin, Kione Greek, Aramaic/Biblical Hebrew, and German.
I am going to try and stay away from East Asia and India as much as possible. Sub-Saharan Africa and South America are jungle wastelands.
Scholarly literature is written in German (modern times), Latin and Classical Arabic (middle ages) when not in the primary language of the people its talking about.
Cuneiform is huge and one of the oldest forms of writing. Hieroglyphics and Demotic are restricted to just Egypt (but have a large textual body).
The Gods speak whatever they need to speak to communicate with whomever they want to talk to (its a deity thing) including seeming to speak in more than language at once if needed. They cant read and write necessarily. In fact some may be illiterate.

The Language List