I was going to write about something more serious – raids and healing and trust. But I won’t, because I’m distracted and excited about something else.

Malleable Goo on me - in German

In case I haven’t mentioned before, I love languages. I know two of them very well (Romanian – duh – and English) and another two at a decent level (French and Spanish). I can understand most Romance languages, I’ve heard enough German to be able to at least distinguish where words begin and end, I learnt Cyrillic when I traveled to Ukraine… and I always love talking about vocabulary, grammar, syntax and style. I guess that makes me a special kind of geek? My jobs have been language-related since I finished university; most of them involved writing or editing people’s writing, and most have been very fun.

What does that have to do with WoW? Well, the obvious first: by playing WoW I make sure I’m always speaking/writing English. Guild chat and forums, raids, talking with guildies outside the game and even meeting them – all this happens in English. More, I got used to many different accents, which is proving very useful now, when I’m in a team consisting of an American, a Filipina, an Ukrainian and an Asian (not sure about the exact country). Trust me, conferences on sucky phones require very good accent-understanding skills.

So, while I get the usefulness of servers divided by language, I don’t like them. I wouldn’t be caught dead on a RO one – partly because 90% of the Romanians I met in game are idiots and partly because I find that very limiting. I like speaking English and meeting people from other cultures. I’d also like to practice the other languages I know, but see, both Spanish and French have their own servers. In my 3 years of WoW, I’ve met one girl from Spain who played on my EN server, and that’s it.

However, despite my dislike of the idea of language-divided servers, I giggle like a kid when I talk with someone with a client in another language or when I join/read about EN/FR/DE servers. A new guildie is from Germany, so I almost died once trying to read what his DBM was saying instead of “Malleable goo on me”… then he got his Roter Protodrache and it was even funnier. A friend used to play on a French realm, so I found out about the wonders of “boubou” (bouclier – shield) and “foufou” (furtif – rogue). I’m having a blast reading Protflashes’ World of Frenchcraft. My short stay on a Spanish server taught me I’m a “cura” (healer), that I will be a “pollo” at level 40 (chicken – I couldn’t for the life of me remember what moonkin translates to exactly) and that I can express my anger fairly well even in Spanish.

So after debating käsekrainers and reading about the Protflashes and Nefernet speaking/learning French, I had a brilliant idea: hey, let’s make a language channel! Two minutes later, I realized the odds of SAN having other language geeks were small, so I scrapped it. And today… squee, it looks like I’m not the only one interested in this, because Nefernet suggested we make language channels for SAN members! The bandwagon was jumped upon, and I can’t wait for tonight. So far there’s SANfr, SANsp, SANde and SANit.. but of course everyone’s free to make more.

You’ll find me in the Spanish and French ones, bugging people and not leveling my warlock.