Resources: Dialects, Languages & How People Talk

Say you’re writing a character from Jamaica, or Nigeria, or Scotland. You know they sound different — but how, exactly? This archive has hundreds of real people reading the same passage in their own natural accent, with transcripts and phonetic notation showing exactly which sounds change. Listen to a Jamaican speaker, then a Scottish one, then someone from Singapore. You’ll start to notice patterns — which vowels shift, which consonants drop, which words get stressed differently. That’s what makes written dialogue sound real instead of like a cartoon. Don’t try to spell out an accent phonetically (that usually looks awkward). Instead, listen here, absorb the rhythm, and let it shape how your character’s sentences flow.

One of the quickest ways to make a character feel rooted in a real place is to give them the right words — not an accent, just vocabulary. In Philadelphia, a long sandwich is a “hoagie.” In Connecticut, it’s a “grinder.” In New York, a “hero.” A kid from rural Minnesota might say “uff da” when surprised; a kid from New Orleans might say “making groceries” instead of “going grocery shopping.” DARE maps these regional differences across all of American English. Browse it when you’re building a character from a specific place. Even one or two regional words dropped naturally into dialogue can make a reader feel like they’re there.

Here’s something that can change how you write: languages don’t just use different words for the same ideas. They organize thought differently. In English, we say “the cat sat on the mat” — subject, verb, object. But in Japanese, the verb comes last. In Welsh, the verb comes first. Some languages are tonal — the pitch of your voice changes the meaning of a word. WALS maps these structural differences across thousands of languages with interactive maps. Why does this matter for your writing? If your character thinks in Mandarin or Navajo or Turkish, their inner voice is shaped by a completely different word order and grammar. When they speak English, traces of that structure might show through — and that’s a powerful way to make a bilingual character feel authentic.

Writing a story set in a place where people speak a language you don’t know? This is your starting point. LINGUIST List is the main hub for the world’s linguistics community, and it links to archives, dictionaries, and learning resources for hundreds of languages. Say you’re writing a character who speaks Yoruba, or Armenian, or Tagalog, and you want to know what a greeting sounds like, or how names work, or what everyday slang sounds like — search here first. You won’t become fluent, but you’ll find enough real detail to make your writing feel researched instead of guessed.

Imagine your character receives a letter written in Arabic, or finds an old notebook in Tamil, or sees a sign in Cherokee syllabary. What does the writing actually look like on the page? Omniglot shows you. It covers every kind of writing system humans have invented — alphabets (like English and Russian), syllabaries (where each symbol represents a whole syllable, like Japanese hiragana), and logographic systems (where each symbol represents a word or idea, like Chinese characters). This is a goldmine for descriptive writing. When your character looks at a page of text they can’t read, you can describe exactly what they see — the curves, the angles, whether it flows left-to-right or right-to-left. That kind of specific, visual detail makes a scene vivid.