Okay, confession time: I do not explain Laylen’s dialect anywhere in the text. Not once. No footnote, no appendix entry, nothing. You just get “ain’,” “yai,” and a woman hissing “MISMANS HIS YATHEDQA” at a room full of Kyusoakin guards, and you’re on your own, bestie.
This was a choice. A slightly unhinged one, maybe, but a choice.
Why Not Just… Explain It?
Because the second I explain it, it stops being a dialect and starts being a vocabulary quiz. Nobody grows up with a translator running subtitles under their own accent. Laylen doesn’t experience her own speech as foreign or in need of decoding — it’s just how she talks. If I hand you a glossary, I’ve already told you that she’s the weird one and you’re the normal one, and that’s not the relationship I want you to have with her.
Same goes for the invented terms: Aelyth, Yathedqa, gibdon, all of it. You’re not supposed to know what a gibdon is the first time it shows up. You’re supposed to flinch a little and keep reading, and by the third or fourth mention you’ve built the definition yourself out of context, which sticks a lot harder than anything I could’ve told you in a footnote.
(I do write appendices. I just don’t want to read footnotes, and I’m assuming you don’t either.)
The Actual Risk Here.
Let’s not pretend this is free. Unglossed invention is a real gamble — some readers are going to bounce right off the first “ain’come here for that” and never look back, and that’s a completely fair reaction to have. I’m asking you to trust rhythm and repetition to do a job that a lot of books hand off to explicit exposition.
So how do you calibrate how much a reader will actually tolerate before you lose them?
Mostly: repetition with enough context clues that the meaning lands even when the word doesn’t. You don’t need to know exactly what a Yathedqa is the first time Laylen calls herself one. You need to know it’s a title, that it means something to her, and that it’s tied up with Mokallai. The rest accumulates.
When It’s the Whole Point.
The Knetann dialect specifically — that’s Slaggan swamp-speak, carried over from an entirely different manuscript (RIP, Bog Fodder, we hardly knew ye) — exists half to characterize where a person’s from and half just to be a delightful little speed bump. I want you to slow down on those lines. I want the clunkiness to register as clunky, on purpose, because that’s what marks someone as an outsider to Vandanei high society before anyone’s said a word about it.
That’s the whole trick, honestly: the confusion is supposed to feel like character information, not like the author forgot to explain something. If it’s landing as the second one, that’s on me and I’ll take the note.
Until next time.
~Shiri