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  • Donna Darling replied to the topic World Building: Language in the forum Annual Theme Discussion 7 years, 3 months ago

    Aaaaaaah the language thing is one of the things I’m most dreading about this story!! Because it’s about Grim Reapers I’ll be dealing with a variety of cultures across the world–not to mention the main bulk of it is set in Victorian America, so I’ll need to be researching the slang and accents from that era (because American accents have evolved, and some of our accents have apparently gone extinct even! did you know that?). And let’s not forget that my MC is an Irish immigrant, so he probably has at least some Gaelic in his vocabulary. i’mscared.

    (Not sure if it’s appropriate to ask this here, but I don’t suppose anyone has any language-related writing resources they’d like to recommend?)

    On the other hand, I’m excited to play around with my own made-up slang for the supernatural sub-cultures of this alternate universe. For example, one familiar-yet-slightly-different curse-phrase they’d use would be “heaven and h*ll!”, because those who are familiar with the existence of actual Grim Reapers are keenly aware of the afterlife and their own mortality.

    The fact that there are differing groups in the supernatural world should also open up the door for different sets of slang! Magicians, Ghost-sellers, Vampires, and even the Reapers themselves will probably have similar-yet-differing cultures that result in slightly different ways of speaking.

    Languages with religious ties such as Hebrew and Latin will also likely come into play, as well as some form of Enochian writing used by the bad guys.

    Anyway, as you can see I need to do a lot more research and put a lot more thought into this, lol, thanks for bringing this back to my attention!

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