On the languages of the world
Until the day someone goes hog wild and creates a large handful of fictional languages just for this world, real-world languages will be used. However, this will be handled in a specific way.
Real-world languages shall not be named at any point in any stories set in this world, nor on any page of this wiki, except those in the Cultures & Ethnicities section.
Personally, I do want to define fictional languages for this world one day, even if they end up just being modified versions of real languages, but it’s extremely low on my list of priorities. Using real-world etymology to create names for fictional people and places doesn’t bother me, but despite that, I find it awkward and uncomfortable to use the real names of real-world languages in a fictional world with none of the same people, places, or development. For the time being, the languages of this world will be given names and nothing more.
So, for example, take the Chiyan people of Sangyon. For all intents and purposes, their language is the same as Korean and their page specifies as such, but rather than writing “Korean” anywhere, their language has been named “Nalamal” instead, so you can write either that or “The Chiyan language” to refer to it. However, writing some things in Korean is perfectly fine and welcomed. Written script will likely be the same as in reality even if a fictional language is created here. In spoken dialogue, especially if the given language has not yet been named, you may also use the name of the given ethnicity as the name of the language, because “I don’t speak Chiyan” sounds much more natural out loud than “I don’t speak the Chiyan language” doesn’t it? That may be considered offensive in some parts of the world though, so keep that in mind too.
This applies absolutely on the wiki, and I strongly recommend that you follow this policy in any other content as well. Either that, or make your own language and make a page for it here too.
As a result of this, English as we know it is not a language in the world. This wiki is written in English, most content based in the world will probably be in English, but the characters do not speak English, they speak their own languages that we don’t know. So essentially, everything about this world is a localization. Some figures of speech that make sense to us may not exist in this world, but we can use them anyway for our convenience. So unless you intend to actually create their language, don’t overthink your word choices, you’re “localizing” the content and have a lot of wiggle room.
As a fun little bonus of that logic, measurement systems that we’re familiar with in the real world can also be used here, even though the people of this world probably have their own systems that we don’t know.