Players should not be making assumptions about the linguistic abilities of other players' characters, regardless of their races and the languages they're speaking.
While elven characters may mock a non-elf character speaking elven, this should be done in-character, not via emotes or other expressions that automatically assume the character was actually speaking the language poorly. Elves are notoriously haughty and might mock someone as speaking poor elven if their elven was flawless, so elves can certainly do that.
Examples:
Incorrect:
Calignostio (an elf): *scoffs at the terribly garbled elven from the human's mouth* That was horrible. You should not sully the language with your human's tongue.
Correct:
Calignostio (an elf): *scoffs* That was horrible. You should not sully the language with your human's tongue.
The difference between the first and second examples is god-moding within the emote. The speaker in the first example is assuming the quality of the spoken language in their emote, in a way that is difficult for the other player to respond to, and in a way that assumes they're correct. The only way the other character can be expected to respond is, of course, to emote back about the quality of their own speech, or to break character to argue with the emote that assumes the quality of their speech.
This is, of course, most common with characters speaking elven when they are not elves, but it can occur with characters speaking other racial or regional languages. The same applies. Do not assume as a player that a character is speaking the language in a way that is "less-than." It is up to the player of the character to emote about the quality of their speech.
I am aware that there is an AD&D book that says only elves can truly speak elven because it actually contains sounds that only elves can hear. This is not the case for the elven language on FRC. The passage from
The Complete Book of Elves that appears below explicitly does not apply on FRC. Many other elements of
The Complete Book of Elves may also present issues.
The Complete Book of Elves is notorious because it unbalanced elves in relation to the other playable races of the game. To make it clear which parts of the language details from
The Complete Book of Elves should not be used on FRC, I have included the text below with part of the text struck out.
Excerpt from The Complete Book of Elves (By Colin McComb):
Many things were excluded and revised when D&D went from AD&D 2e to D&D 3e, and the language-within-a-language aspect of elven should be treated as something that was not carried over from 2e. It is possible for humans, halflings, and other races, even dedicated dwarves, to learn to speak elven well, not just on FRC but generally in D&D 3.x.
Players of elves are still free, of course, to RP that someone speaks elven poorly, but it should not be through emotes that dictate the qualify of the other character's speech.
That applies to other languages as well. If a character knows the language, they know the language. It's up to their player to determine their character's level of fluency with the languages for which they have widgets.
When I oversee language learning RP, and award characters with language widgets for newly learned languages, I do inform them that their roleplay should reflect that they have not entirely mastered the language for the next three or four months after receiving the language widget. However, after three or four months of being able to speak and understand the language, they're free to RP as fully fluent. I generally allow players to police themselves about this, but if I see someone using a newly acquired widget (their character having just recently learned the language) and roleplaying a sudden mastery of the language, I may send a /tell reminding them that their character is not yet a master of the language. However, language-learning RP on FRC is not merely a stroll in the park, so I trust that anyone that has gone through it (to the tune of months of RP before gaining a widget) should be able to roleplay gaining fluency for a few months then move on to full fluency.
I am unlocking this thread for related follow-up questions. However, that is not an solicitation for opinions on how elven (or other languages, as the case may be) should be RPed.