#oh yeah reminder that spanish dialects vary A LOT

[13reasonstoeatthatcake]

Neil and languages

Neil knowing two languages other than English is already impressive, as I'm sure everyone is aware, but the fact of the matter is, for someone who'd supposedly hid all over the world from his mafioso father, I'm afraid German and French are... woefully inadequate in helping him blend in.

(Just to be clear, Nora Sakavic has absolutely made a masterpiece and I'd never dream of creating something as amazing as the All For The Game trilogy. It's just that I'm a language nerd and also from (Eastern) Europe, and I love forcing my own interests and experiences on characters, and as Neil is one of the only trilingual characters I've ever seen in media I can't pass up on the opportunity to make him a polyglot.)

So, without further ado, I present to you: the languages Neil Josten has had to use while on the run, a very long list of HCs.

English: since it's (presumably) Neil's mother language, he has the most practice with switching dialects in English. Neil can do almost every English accent that he's come across, which is helpful for when he needs to blend in a country where the official language is English (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand are most frequent but he's also had to do it in India and Malaysia. Not UK, for obvious reasons, and pretending to be tourists in Europe can only hold up for so long)

German: German accents are ridiculous, but significantly easier to pull off than English accents. The Austrian and Hessen accents in particular are hellish for me, but knowing Neil he probably has them all down pat. You can maybe use German outside of Germany, Switzerland and Austria, especially in France and Italy where a lot of people learn German rather than English, but up north? Yeah, no, there it's either one of the holy trinity Danish/Norwegian/Swedish or English. We're not even mentioning Finnish, oh no. A lot of people in Egypt speak German as their third language, as well as Poland and other West/South Slavic nations, but then you risk standing out as that foreign German mother and son combo, which, no. Speaking of German, though,

Yiddish: Is a language very close to German, as in close enough that even I, who can hardly understand German, gets the gist of it. Even if Mary was not a practicing Jew, or knew Hebrew or another dialect better, it's an easy language to pick up when you have German as a base and also creates a fuller backstory. The downside to that is that it's recognisable that a Jewish, Yiddish mother and son combo are walking around, so maybe it's used in rare occasions.

Arabic: I actually hc Mary's family immigrated from Israel years ago and since they both look vaguely Arab/'eastern' enough to pass, and since in the books Neil says they spent some time in Dubai, they've probably had to learn some Arabic. They probably learned Modern Standard Arabic, and depending on how long they stayed in a country, they adapted it to the local dialect. (Arabic dialects vary from each other about as much as Chinese dialects do, aka A Lot. They probably used the excuse that nobody would understand their mother dialect and that's why they communicate in MSA only, but again, no matter how common that is it would still make them paranoid about standing out and so they'd move quickly.) A lot of Arabic countries however also speak a lot of

French: honestly, out of all the languages Neil speaks this is probably the hardest one because French people are fucking judgemental when you fuck up even a slight thing, ergo there's a higher risk of them being revealed because of 'oh yeah, mother and son, their French was horrendous'. French is spoken in Switzerland, Morocco and other Arabic countries, Québec, the whole of French Polynesia, also a lot of Slavic countries under the rule of USSR, but that's the older folks.

Serbian: As much as I'd like to get my favourite character to speak my mother language, I'm certain if Mary had to choose a Slavic language (other than Russian, which in official(?) post-canon Neil learns with Andrew) to learn it would have been Serbian, because it comes in a three-way package deal with fluency in Bosnian and Croatian, which makes it a lot easier to disappear. Additionally, it gives a good understanding of how other Slavic languages work, and it's only a matter of some tweaking to pretend to speak another Slavic language entirely. As someone from the literal only Slavic language that doesn't use cases, I understand up to 80% of every South Slavic and East Slavic language, and if somebody informs me of what roughly is going on, I can understand up to 70% of every West Slavic one as well. Neil and his mother might not have learned Russian, but Serbian is a must, especially since they'd blend in better with us Balkan folk than the more northern countries. Countries Serbian can be used in, with some minor tweaking: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, alongside almost all of Europe if they decide to act as immigrants or tourists (this last point counts for every language on this list, by the way)

Spanish: Spanish is the third most spoken language in the world after Chinese and English (if we're talking native speakers). There is literally no continent where it isn't spoken. While they would need to tweak their accents and such, the entirety of South America, Mexico, Cuba, the Phillipines and some African countries are all ideal places to hide. Portugese, I know, is an entirely different language, but not that hard to get the knack of once you have Spanish as a base, and it's the same thing with Italian.

Languages Neil and his mother haven't learned, even though they've hidden in the countries: a rough overview. (Note: though he hasn't learned them, Neil still probably had to memorise a set list of phrases well enough to sound fluent, but shy.)

Any northern European language. Mary was insistent they don't waste time or effort on non-essential or one-note languages; Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish are only useful in small parts of Europe and Africa, and speaking Afrikaans in Africa is a good way to get noticed, so they didn't learn that. Same thing with Finnish, Latvian, Estonian, Lituanian. They had some basic understanding of Belarussian and Russian thanks to Serbian, but nothing more.

Any African language. While Swahili is spoken all thorough Africa, it's not the language barrier that makes it hard to blend in but the colour of their skin, ergo almost the whole continent is out.

Indian languages. They'd only hidden in big cities, so people knew English, and Hindi is too complicated to learn when you're moving through so many different dialects and other, completely different languages.

Any and all languages in the Caucasus region. Those are hard to speak or learn, and they don't stay long there anyway. A lot of people there speak Russian as their second language, as well as people from Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Mongolia, etc) but again, they don't spend much time there.

Turkic languages. They learned a bit in Turkey, but again, it's not useful enough, and the dialect variations are too big without a common dialect to bind them together like Arabic had. Same thing with Greek or Albanian.

Any East Asian languages. Two non-Asians speaking any East Asian language causes too much attention.

For now, this is all I’ve got on the ‘polyglot Neil’ front. If I ever decide to include something else, it’s probably not going to be as long!

Polish. The name ‘Wesninski’ sounds Polish, if nothing else (I couldn’t find an etymology that wasn’t connected to this series) and there’s supposed to be a lot of Polish immigrants in Baltimore, so I think if Nathan Wesninski ever knew Polish, Mary would never want to hear the language again, and even if he had no connection to his Polish roots, she still would associate the language with him. Maybe Neil would one day decide to learn it, but until then it’s probably just another thing that reminds him of his father.

Bonus round:

If we're disregarding what Nora said while answering questions on tumblr and instead bend to the laws of logic, Mary and Neil would have learned Russian because it's literally THE lingua franca of Eastern Europe. It doesn't matter if you're in Bulgaria, Georgia or Kazakhstan, you speak Russian and people naturally assume you're here for work. However, I love andreil more than I love being this petty, so ig them learning Russian together is cute enough to make me forget the logistic nightmare this is.