Language help please.

[Jareth Valar]

We are using "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" from Pyramid 3/42. Great article overall by Roger Burton West.

However, I have a couple of area I'd like some help with.

With the article a basic native speaker of a language has a base skill of 12. Using this, I would assume that anyone with a language skill of 12 would be considered Native by the base rules. That being said I'm thinking a skill lev el of 8-11 would be Accented and anything lower would be Broken?

That being said, in the article it uses the language skill as a cap, something that doesn't wholly work for me. That said, even a native speaker with a Singing of 21 would have to roll against a language of 12 as well. I know there have been some suggestions on how to handle "Cap skills" elsewhere on the board, but I cannot find them. Any thought on how to handle this without using it as a cap?

Also, when pulling in new languages, does anyone have any idea on how to judge modifiers for related/offshoot languages? I was thinking on a modifier for every step away from the language (if using language classification trees) but I've seen some trees with more branches that there should be modifiers. Any thoughts would help greatly.

We love the article and use this as the base language set for our modern games, but we've come into some areas where we need more that the listed languages and have always had an issue with cap skills.