How do you handle languages in your campaign?
So far I've had common be a small uncomplicated trade language that changes slightly as you span over geographical areas. I still have race languages, including Human. But given a drastic enough area change, even racial languages will be different to some extent. And of course, if one race completely dominates an area, their language pretty much is "common".
What do you think?
I've never played in a campaign where they were treated that way. Common was "common." Humans know common and can select others but only know common initially. All languages are the same wherever you go (Elven is elven regardless of where you are). The euphemisms and slang may differ on region but the language itself doesn't change. That's been my experience anyway.
I play in Golarion, so common is generally Taldan, and racial languages are roughly the same. Hasn't come up yet, but I would say elvin in one area vs another would be a bit like talking to someone in california as opposed to newyork. They speak the same language, but there's differences.
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Currently I also run games set in Golarion so yup on Taldan. Which is how I've almost always run my games. Common (by what ever name) is the language spoken in most of the campaign region. Only in my Planescape game is it a sort of pigeon trade tongue, but there I'm shooting for a different feel.
Back in the Second Edition days I picked up the(Dragonlance) Taladas Campaign Setting. and it had very cool rules for language trees and familiarity that I adapted for a homebrew game I used to run. Something like that could be easily mocked up in Pathfinder using the linguistics skill as the basis.
In my world, common is a trade tongue. Depending on the continent you are on, it's called Common or Tradespeak. East continent common is called Devilspeak and is used to talk to foreign devils (ie; trade tongue for dealing with foreigners). The three are different, but if you know one, you can pick up the others with a few weeks of effort (no language slot required, just getting used to a different dialect, kind of like an Arkansas back woods guy getting used to New Jersey english).
Elven is the same all over a given continent, and the written words are the same world wide, but northern continent elven is different from southern continent elven is different from eastern continent elven. Again, like tradespeak, you can make yourself understood and eventually carry on normal conversations without spending additional ranks, you just have an accent.
Dwarven is like Elven. So is Goblin. And so is Orc.
Draconic is the same world wide, no dialects. Aquan is the same way, as are all the outsider tongues, the elemental tongues, and so on. Sylvan is the same all over too.