I was recently challenged for my application of real-world languages to my fantasy setting. 

By making Elvish correspond with this language and Dwarvish with that, my intent was to provide game masters with a dozen complete languages with which to populate their games. Need a note in the lizardfolk language or a name drawn from the giants? Easy - just head to Google Translate! Creating a diverse population becomes accessible, even easy.

That was my intent. In practice, the handbook read a bit differently - or, at the very least, could be read differently.

Thinking myself clever, I applied English to the species that conquered half the globe. English is the "common tongue" of all the fantasy books and games I've ever played, so making it the language of the empire made sense! But what I had done by explicitly making English the "common tongue" was diminish the other languages. They became secondary languages, nothing more than flavour. Only English really mattered. What a colonial perspective!

Also, English is only the common tongue of the games I've played because I'm monolingual - and it's not even the common tongue, anyway: English is only the language in which the stories have been told to me, and the language I participate through. It's not the language of the characters, and never has been.

Of course, I never pretended that it was actually English my empire was speaking - it was just the real-world counterpart! The game master's tool!

Yet the inference, and more, is there.

Last year, I scoured my manual and found a number of glaring racial biases in my heritage profiles. I removed these, but casually left the real-world languages appended to each profile as if language has nothing attached to it. Certainly, it is not my fault if a player sees a certain language and uses it to make an assumption about the fantasy species it's connected to, but my earlier edits proved that I was not immune to that myself. I may have removed the textual complications, but subtext was surely still there, and would always be. It's not my place to take responsibility for every thought and action of players, but it is on me to do everything I can to minimize risk.

Honestly, my thoughts are still unformed, but I immediately resonated with the challenge. I have removed the language counterparts from the manual.

What are your thoughts?

Also I want to admit my mistake in using Golems alongside mummies as "ubiquitous" monsters in my update addressing cultural appropriation. I have been corrected in this, and have called the living lumps of magically charged rock "Earthborn" in the Creature Codex, and the magical discipline is now Dynamist (creating constructs) instead of Golemist (creating golems).

These updates are not yet reflected in the audio release of the handbook. The digital PDF has been updated and the print-on-demand will be updated within the next few days (currently in review).