The Vengeful Polyglot

One of the greatest parts of being part of fandom is coming into contact with such a diverse group of people. There are people representative of all origins, all walks of life, and all skill-sets – truly a sampling platter of what a variety of people there are in the world. One of my favorite things, personally, is meeting people of different cultural backgrounds, and people who speak foreign languages. It’s fascinating, especially if it’s a language you’ve been interested in studying. It’s especially wonderful if you can help each other – I had a German pen-pal I would beta for and swap English tips with in exchange for her teaching me some really nifty German swear words. People of different origins from yours can be great assets as friends and serve as a wealth of interesting information.

Being that fandom is so diverse, especially in terms of what language we all speak, understandably there is a semi-prevalent use of other languages, secondary languages, in fanfic. However, sometimes this is done less-than-ideally and so I’d like to offer some tips about how to incorporate foreign languages into a fic in an appropriate manner.

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