#is my yusuf bias showing y/y

[victimhood]

Characters and Languages in my TOG football AU

For context, this is the universe within my fanfic The Beautiful Game. This is a post I’ve wanted to make for some time, based off the fact that:

1) In The Old Guard canon, we know our characters speak many languages

2) Elite football is one of the few professions where people pick up multiple languages by necessity, for communicating with staff, teammates etc. Just look at how impressive Romelu Lukaku is.

And so, just for my own nerdy benefit, here goes:

Andy: English, French, Ukrainian, Russian (+ learning Italian for her new job)

I regret not being able to flesh Andy out more in my fic, but Andy is Ukrainian and also holds a Canadian passport. She played for Ukraine, but grew up mostly in Canada where she can be more open with her sexuality.

Booker: French, English (+ learning Italian for his new job)

Booker is the least multilingual character in my fic lol. He spent his first 20 years in France, and then he spent the next 6 years in England. He knows a lot of Algerian slang words that are now colloquial French. He will learn one more language due to work which you will find out in the epilogue LOL.

Nile: English, Spanish, Catalan, high school French, (+ learning Italian as an American expat in Italy)

Nile grew up in the South Side of Chicago, and then moved to California for a year. She makes the effort to learn Spanish to communicate with the Hispanic community around her, and took French in high school because it was cool. Her Spanish is gloriously Mexican and Puerto Rican-inflected. She then lived in Barcelona for 6 years, so that’s where she picked up Catalan.

Yusuf: Maghrebi Arabic (Tounsi and Darija), Dutch, French, English, Catalan, Spanish, Italian

Yusuf is the most multilingual character within the AU!!!! How sexy is this dude. His family is Tunisian, and his parents moved to the Netherlands where there is a large Moroccan community--so within the family they use the more Tunisian inflected form of Maghrebi Arabic, but with their community it is way, way more Moroccan inflected. (ref: Yusuf says wilywilywily to Booker in ch.75). He speaks French because...*shakes fist* (colonialism), he speaks Dutch because he had to learn that in school, he speaks English because pretty much every Dutch person speaks excellent English. He learned Castillian Spanish for fun on the side, and then moved to Barcelona where he picked up Catalan to impress the locals. Nicolò di Genova taught him Italian when he moved to Italy. (Side note: the reason why he’s referred to as Yusuf all through the fic is because the Dutch j is pronounced as y. There’s no...Joe...in the Anglicized way. Yusuf does have American relatives and thus there are American Joes in his family LOL.)

Nicolò: Italian, French, English

HAHAHAHAHA bet you weren’t expecting the one in the middle!!! Nichi also does a terrible version of Ligurian for his mom. (Like, his mom speaks Ligurian to him and he replies in Italian. This is a total dialect call out because this is how I sound like talking with my parents but with our language/dialect.) Nichi picked up French in school for the second language requirement. He has NEVER told Booker about this and has NEVER spoken to Booker in a word of French. However, he speaks to Yusuf’s Tunisian relatives in French. Nichi did spend a year in England, which helped his English a bit.

Lykon: French, Portuguese, English, Wolof

I made him part Senegalese, part Guinea-Bissau. Actually, my dearest wish was to make Lykon descended from griots but I just don’t have the level of knowledge to write that competently. His family lives all over the place too, and he also holds EU citizenship via Belgium.

Quynh: Vietnamese, French, English 

Quynh is a transnational adoptee in my fic, so her mother tongue and original language is Vietnamese. However, she was adopted by French parents and grew up in a wealthy part of Paris (16th Arr), so she was schooled in French. She went to the US for her postgrad studies (PhD), so her English is excellent as well.