I agree with Valg's viewpoint, too. I made this argument because I thought it addressed the issue at hand. I never said that different members of a race would speak different variations of dark-elf, merely that some members of the race might not speak dark-elf at all. Some of them might speak dwarvish instead, or in addition to speaking dark-elf. But then that makes it nigh-impossible to encode in any sort of fun and realistic way. And I'm certainly not interested in spending the time coding such a system when there are so many other projects to do.

Valg's point was that if I'm playing a character who was raised as a dark-elf and presumably knows how to speak dark-elf, it doesn't make any sense to not be able to understand the "dark-elf" language someone else is speaking. His argument was not specifically against the idea of hard-coded languages in the mud but rather the tendency for some players to use OOC languages as if they were IC. The only IC languages we have are in the Lyceum, and they are the smidgeons that we all agree on.

If you want to know what we all agree on, there is a simple language helpfile in the game - help LANGUAGE. We're working on making races and racial languages a little more defined, as well. I suggest you stay tuned for developments.