> Which just suggests that there are models in the real world for either the
> "very hard to understand" obstacle (when needed for for your story) and for
> the "we all understand each other" trope (when you just want the story to
> move past this issue).
That's the key point.
Perhaps the rural communities of the Oslira valley have a range of
> accents/dialects,
Count on that!
> but the Dara Happa cities all have a strongly similar
> accent within one dialect.
I think the DH cities have distinctive dialects dependin on which city, and which class of people.
Perhaps that clan opposite of your neighbors is
> almost totally unintelligible to you, but then you never really met them
> either, since they stick mostly to their own lands.
I think that mobility is the key. Wherever people do not move much, they develop dialects. That why there are so many more in the UK than in the US, where a lot of people move a lot. But no one would deny that there are distinctive dialects for New England, the South, and Texas. The "mid-Atlantic" dialect (maybe Midwestern) is the one prescribed for TV, though, which tends to universalize it.
And I have to mention a movie that I heard about, but did not see, which was about lower class Brits, and there were subtitles, in English! (trainspotting?)
--
Greg Stafford
Game Designer
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