Thanks for bumping the thread. That's a great chart. Now I want to do that for my setting. I think I will superimpose it on the map though, since my language familiars more or less correspond to geographical areas. (I think that is less true for Shadow World but the mapped part of my setting is smaller.)
It depends on the language - some of them are specific to a regional area (or even a specific ethnic group within that regional area), adn this is especially true for the old Loremaster Campaign Modules (Tanara and Mur Fostisyr, where each racial group basically had its own language). However, when you zoom out, the "main" languages tend to migrate and be tweaked and twisted regionally - this is basically what happens to the variants of Old Emer and Shay in Emer, and Rhaya in Jaiman (with Rhaya being initially a variant of the Shay language)... and all Erlin elven variants.
About Erlin: my take on it is that it is a language with much higher fluidity and variability than the other elven languages, because of the Erlin mindset. the Erlini, while technically immortal like the other elven races, are in tune with nature and live in the "now" with a much greater intensity than the Iylari, and tend to "go with the flow", adopting what works and discarding what doesn't. As a result, their language, which might have been uniform in the beginning, has been much more affected by regionalisms than the Iylar and Dyar languages. This has been reinforced by the fact that there is often very little need for literacy in the typical Erlin world, while the Iylar cultures are completely dependent on literacy (In fact, I think it would not be much of a stretch to say that the written form of Erlin is mostly used by humans, with Erlini using Iylar more readily when they want to get something written. Incidentally, since it was much simpler and "down to earth" than Iylar, it was much easier to learn for humans, which often adopted it as a 'trade' language regardless of its racial origin.
It is likely that the language of the Shuluri could have mutated in much the same way... except that it is very environment-specific and most land-based races have no use for it (that, plus the fact that Shuluri cultures are fairly isolated because of their dual home environment nature, drastically limits the geographical migration of the language and, thus, its actual variability. However, two Shuluri cultures from different parts of the world would likely have trouble understanding each other except for basic concepts - once again, the lesser emphasis on the written word would remove one of the main linguisitical anchors).
What I miss from the early Loremaster campaign books (linguisitically speaking) is the section on languages. Language is not merely vocabulary - details about sentence structure, use of modal forms, emphasis on ideological concepts, and so on, are very interesting because they help picture a culture and open a window on how they think and what is important for them. The language of the Syrkakar in the Iron Wind module was perhaps the best example of it, even if it was too short for my taste. By comparison, the linguisitic addendum in the Master Atlases were fairly bland - sure, I could pick a few words and build my own names, but it gave me nothing about the people who spoke the language, which was a shame. If that kind of section could be inserted back into campaign modules, I would be a happy dragon indeed
[one of the interesting side effects of the MA linguistic addendum, about the Loariki language, was that it convinced me of two things: one, that I absolutely needed to rename it - to Kinaa, as it is, and to ignore the provided lexicon which sounded awfully like 'greek for dummies' and would have made my players scoff at the very least. And second, that the Loari most certainly had constructed their own language from scratch at a much later date, having used Iylar before for a long time, and this language was designed to provide technical and scientific precision and sentence concision, which were of paramount importance for scientists and engineers and could not be achieved by the flowery, multi-modal, and layered structure of Iylar, the "language of beauties", more useful for literature, poetry, and restitution of the myriad nuances of emotions].
