Worlds need languages to function.

A language is basically a system for expressing ideas.

A good language is succinct, highly expressive, and intuitive to learn.

There are obvious languages like English, Spanish, and Mandarin, and less obvious languages like film, photography, music, dance, HTML, Flash, and Java.

When the world changes, sometimes a new language is needed to handle that change. For instance, telegraphs spawned morse code, airplanes spawned air traffic control signals, and computers spawned machine language, C++, Java, and many others.

When building a world, you need to decide which language you will use. Foreign novelists and filmmakers have long faced this question, weighing the comfort of writing in their native tongue with the larger potential audience of writing in English. Online it is no different. If you use Java or Flash instead of HTML, you will be able to build more nuanced worlds, but your audience will likely be smaller.

You have to decide if you want to make operas that affect a few people deeply, or folk songs that spread far and wide.

You may decide that no existing language can satisfy the needs of your world, and so you may choose to become a language maker, which presents its own challenges.

Or you may decide that an adequate language does exist, but you don’t know it yet, and so you may choose to become a language learner. If you choose this path, remember there is a difference between learning a language and actually using that language to say something, and that saying something is far more important (and difficult).

Don’t get stuck like the schoolboy, endlessly practicing grammar and learning vocabulary, but never writing a poem, a play, or a novel.