I recall, many years ago, on my first trip into England, I was sitting on the train from the ferry, eyeing a group of cute dutch girls across the aisle. At least, I thought they were dutch, based on the sound of their language. (I had forgotten to pack a book, so had little to do but listen to them and try to place them). I couldn't totally rule out german since I didn't know all the german accents, and could have been flemish.
After about an hour, when one of them said some simple sentence quite loudly, I suddenly realized that they were speaking english. It just hadn't *sounded* like english to me. Once I made that mental adjustment I was able to pick up some bits of the conversation, but by no means all of it.
And that was after having spent two years at an international school, surrounded by a variety of accents, and listening to the BBC world service, so used to 'standard' english.
But I think in most stories such things are more annoying than interesting. It is one classic story element that I think most game rules don't handle too well is the classic situation of the hero who is good at picking up languages, and travels around, becoming at least functionally fluent in the encountered languages quite quickly. How many RQ ticks would it take, or how many hero points invested in HQ, for your character to become functional in a language, and who wants to bother?
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