Ziro the Hutt spoke “Basic” just fine, although he did have a bit of a funny voice — maybe based on Truman Capote?

There are few races that are unable to speak Basic, and they tend to be specifically called out in the books as to what the reason is, and what can be done about it. Fewer still are unable to understand Basic, even if they don’t have the physical vocal equipment to speak it. But there are a few.

But what works for me in my game may not work for you in yours, YMMV, etc….

Long answer short: Plot and common sense for me.

Space Station along a big Hyperspace route?

Same as a very touristy place in my country, every vendor is capable of talking to most potential customers either by himself or a protocol droid.

Backwater Planet with no regular traffic?

Nope, ich sprechen nix Basic. You can talk with your hand and feet, but even that is difficult because the local residents have burning tentacles for arms and communicate by whipping their under-tentacle-hair back and forth.

Also, I had a talk about the campaign with my players before we started about things like micromanaging food for example, and we agreed that language is adjucated by the GM and plot relevant, meaning if it makes sense people understand each other, but if it's relevant to plot (Leia + Ewoks) it's up to me.

So if you look in EOTE Core, you'll see the protocol droid has 3 ranks each in Knowledge: Education, and Knowledge: Xenology. At my table, if this was going to be an issue or a big part of a campaign (like an exploration based campaign, or a trading/smuggling focused campaign), I'd probably use an Education check the first time they encountered the language to see if they can speak/understand the language itself. I'd start with an Average check, and increase the difficulty as I see fit based on how unlikely the player is to know that language, and add some setbacks if there are some elements to the language that a player couldn't hear/volcalize, or mimic with body language (lekku, for example). That first check determines if they know the language or not. I'd have them write it down on their character sheet. I might also allow players to make this check using Knowledge Core, Xenology, Outer Rim, or even Lore checks if appropriate, but at a higher difficulty.

If they don't know a language, but desperately want to learn, I might charge a low amount of XP to add a language. Leia seems to pick up Chewie's speech patterns by ROTJ, and Luke seems to understand Artoo on Dagobah, despite asking 3P0 to translate Artoo's beeps in A New Hope. Another way to do this, is I might allow a player to add a new language to their list every time they take a rank in Knowledge Education, Core, Outer Rim, or Xenology.

If a player didn't know a language, I'd probably add some setback dice to any attempted social checks, and impose limits on keeping the communicated intents simple.

If I ran it this way, I'd probably do away with the idea that you automatically can communicate with all party members. But I might let them take a number of languages at character generation equal to their intellect (plus species starting languages), so that everyone is starting with like 2-5 languages.

I think for most campaigns, you can just hand wave this. But for those that want to track known languages, it can provide some real utility to protocol droids, make for some interesting inter-party dynamics (Chewie and Artoo can't always communicate effectively with other party members, and having 3P0 filter their desired words can lead to comedy at the table as easily as it does in the films.

My group are running a conversion for an older system (i think d20) that had rules for language, when it came up we quickly decided on an Int based custom skill:

(INT)Xenolinguisitcs: you know or can learn languages equal to Intelligence for each rank in Xenolinguistics. This is in addition to your native language and/or basic on GM discretion. To learn/understand a new language make a Xenolinguistics check.

Umm, everybody did not understand jabba, That is why he used a translator... I.E. C-3PO

SnowDragon...Yah...good point, but still, story-wise, it didn't matter that they didn't know Huttese....because the story provided a translator. The whole scene, was atmosphere.

For Star Wars, I prefer my game to be more pulpy and less realistic in this regard. Also, it is one less thing, as a GM, for me to keep track of. In the end. I either want my players to understand the information, or I want it to remain a mystery (maybe they need to get the recording to a translator) and for creating language matrixs to cross reference for various interactions isn't necessarily fun for me.

I do, however, think that going through that effort can be very rewarding, depending on the game and depending on the people at the table....and by no means would I criticize anybody wanting to go that route. My main point is for Star Wars (movie-wise that is...I have very little experience with any EU), language is just atmosphere and keeping track of languages isn't necessary to have a "Star Wars experience".

I haven't read through the whole thread, but here's what I have done;

My players have been exploring the Unknown Regions for some months now, and at many times have they found ancient relics, temples etc. with forgotten languages. I've had them perform Daunting and Formiddable Lore tests to see if they have encountered anything similar before and manage to understand the gist of the text. However sometimes when the text is simply too complex for them to understand I just tell them that they cannot understand it.

At the present time they have found an ancient Jedi Temple with holocrons etc and other resources, I then allowed them to do an Education skillcheck, to see if they were able to use the information available to learn this ancient "Lore" language, the phew of them that succeeded the test now know "Lore" and no longer need to roll to read that text.

If the language barrier is important to the story use Knowledge Education or Xenology. In my opinion, the Knowledge skills need to be narrowed down...