A Word About "Dialect"

The language-creation roleplaying game you never knew you needed

Dialect is one of my favorite games ever. It combines language arts with roleplaying. It’s endlessly changeable, fascinating, and I can’t get anybody to play it with me.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. My family¹ plays it once a year on my birthday. I once roped in a sister and a few nieces and nephews. Nobody hates it, but nobody shares my enthusiasm for it. I think there are two reasons why.

First, it’s hard to explain how to play it. I’ll give it a shot here.

The game explores how language is created and how it changes. It’s played in three rounds. In Round One, the players are part of in an isolated community, and develop new words for various concepts like work, death, fun, duty, transgressions, or virtue. In Round Two, they encounter outsiders, and the language changes to reflect that. In Round Three, their isolation ends as they become part of the larger world, and their unique language fades.

Obviously the first step is to create the isolated community. Some of the scenarios I’ve played are:

• an outpost on Mars

• an underground ant colony

• a far-future Earth where only robots are left

• a group of small islands cut off from any mainland

• caretakers of a magical house and property that doesn’t allow us to leave.

The director of the game will also come up with two turning points to shift the game into Round Two and Round Three. For instance, in my last Birthday Game, we were the caretakers of the magical house. Round Two began when a stranger came to the front gate. Round Three began when more of those newcomers actually took up residence in the house. These events changed our dynamics by ending our isolation.

Together, players discuss their community, deciding on the concepts that are most important to them. As caretakers of this house, we believed we’d been chosen to take care of the house, and and we didn’t particularly want to leave because there was so much to be done. These beliefs shaped our priorities, our characters, and how we used the words.

Each player creates a character based on an Archetype card (scavenger, celebrity, sage, innocent, etc.) We make up names and a brief backstory. Then we start building our unique language.

There are cards for each of the three rounds. During the round, everyone creates or modifies a word, and then uses that word in a roleplay conversation with another player.

Round One cards prompt players to create new words or change the meaning of existing words. For instance, my character was named Rycher², and I (as the Sage) frequently got after my fellow caretakers stay busy. My son’s character, the Explorer, found my officiousness intrusive, so he created the word “Rylist” referring to the to-do lists that I insisted they accomplish. Prompted by another card, DJ made “lost” a euphemism for “death,” since as far as we could tell, it was entirely possible to become eternally lost in the depths of the magical house. Sparkler’s character, a very anxious Protector who made repairs on the house, coined the term rend to refer to any a glitch in the magic of the house.

Round Two cards build on the vocabulary we just created, often by changing their meanings. For instance, Round Two began when someone rang the bell at the front gate, and it opened for the first time that any of us could remember. The newcomer said that they would return, and disappeared. Someone took Iris’s term for a glitch, rend, and applied it to the newcomer. We now referred to the “Rend” who rang the bell. DJ created a word that reflected a new schism among the community: rendefender, as in, the faction who wanted to defend the house against the Rend. Who knew what they wanted, after all? What if they arrived, and we all found ourselves lost?

Round Three began when the Rends returned — many of them — and the magical house accepted them as the owners. Round Three cards encourage players to change the language further as we explore how different things are with the outsiders now among us. What if the newcomers even start using our own words? Rend dropped out of use now that they lived among us. Rendefender became a very embarrassing term that no one used anymore. Meanwhile, the newcomers picked up on the word rylist, the one that the Explorer coined to make fun of my to-do lists. Not exactly understanding its use, the newcomers applied it to me as a title. I became the rylist of the caretakers.

The game ends with a Legacy prompt: where did our characters go, what did they do, or how did they end up? We all came up with an ending for our stories. Some people left the house. Others stayed. The house (according to me, because I was directing the game) granted benefits to all of the caretakers for their faithful service. We ended the game satisfied and laughing a lot.

So that’s how it’s played. It makes sense once you get into it, but can seem inaccessible just from a description.

The second reason that this game lacks appeal for a lot of people is that the original instruction book, while very thorough in explaining how to play the game, is relentlessly sad. The proper name of the game, in fact, is Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies. All of the scenarios offered in the book are heavy, dark, or downright grim. All of the Legacy prompts at the end have a tinge of gray and tragedy to them. It’s as if the creators couldn’t imagine a scenario in which a language could fade away simply because life changed course. My family was reluctant to immerse themselves in a sad story, even just once a year.

So I made a few changes. I created a lighthearted, fun scenario. I removed the requirement that they had to hold a conversation with another player (for some reason, that bit of roleplay was a real barrier to some of them). And I kept the game moving at a very quick pace. The instruction book says that a full game of Dialect can take three to four hours. We finished my Birthday Game in just over one hour. Everyone ended happy, so I have high hopes of playing again next year.

This is an amazing game. Its flexibility encourages creativity that sometimes seems to come out of nowhere. Decklan surprised us all by describing a room of the house that was full of water, in which lived whales who used very vulgar language. Pen created a greenhouse where fierce carnivorous plants thrived behind glass, and she often sat in the green-tinted room and painted. We all loved the setting and had fun “exploring” the house and grounds. At the end, we looked through our index cards with our new vocabulary words written in Sharpie, and were surprised that, over the course of an hour, we had indeed created our own dialect.

If you’re interested in language and roleplaying, this is the game for you. I’m telling you right now, stop what you’re doing and put it on your rylist.

1. Family known here as: my husband DJ, my daughters Pen and Iris, and my sons Knight and Decklan.

2. This name came about through my favorite method for creating fantasy names and words: take any common word (cherry), split it up (cher ry), and reverse the syllables (rycher).