I am going to go off the assigned exercise a little and look at which languages I am going to use as inspiration for my various in setting languages. Obviously neither the players nor I will be speaking these languages, but it will help with the direction of the nouns in the game and give some flavor. The exercise in the guide asks me to consider what sort of syllables and sounds I would like to hear to give various feelings. Two examples they give are a language that should sound soft like water or a language that should sound hard like Klingon. I have done a fair bit of traveling and worked with expats from a variety of countries during my time in asia, so I feel more comfortable just getting these sounds and names directly from various languages.
The native northern population is going to take inspiration from the Goidelic/Gaelie languages. The city states will likely be influenced by another indo-european language to feel more familiar, likely an Anglo-Germanic mash-up. The western empire will likely speak a Hellenic language for administrative purposes, with other dialects active within the empire.
Not trying to be racist, but the less familiar the race is supposed to be the less familiar the language will be. Dwarves will not sound like some sort of Scotsman if encountered, and will speak a language completely unrelated to other indo-european languages. I am not certain which I would take inspiration from, but it the spoken language will be less important in this case than the written language, which will definitely not take the form of stereotypical basic runes.
I suppose the Dwarven script should consist of straight lines since that would be the easiest way to carve letters into rock, but perhaps they are so skilled at stonework that they can have a flowing script that would be amzingly difficult for any human to duplicate into stone.
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