Dialect - Starter guide

What is Dialect?

Dialect is a storytelling game about an isolated community and the language that binds it together, from its first words to its last. There is no game master and no dice. Instead, three to five players collaboratively invent a jargon, spoken by a group cut off from the wider world, and watch that language grow, shift, and eventually fall silent as the community's story reaches its end.

The game was created by linguists Hakan Seyalioglu and Kathryn Hymes and published through Thorny Games after a 2016 Kickstarter that raised ten times its original goal. Seyalioglu has spoken about drawing on his own experience as a Turkish speaker in the United States, and Hymes has described language itself as the foundation the game treats as its real subject: not just a set of words, but the shape of a community's identity. Dialect won a silver ENNIE for Best Game in 2019 alongside several other indie design awards, and its book carries contributed chapters from conlang specialist David Peterson, known for creating the languages of Game of Thrones, and linguist Steven Bird on language revitalization.

How does the system work?

A session opens with the table choosing a Backdrop, one of over a dozen settings ranging from historical to speculative, which frames who the Isolation are and why they are cut off. From there the group defines three Aspects of the community, two suggested by the Backdrop and one invented outright, and settles on what specifically isolates them, whether that is geography, belief, or something stranger.

Each player then draws an archetype card, Innocent, Zealot, Leader, Jester, and more, which shapes how their character relates to the community's Aspects. Play itself revolves around Language cards: each names a concept, from Greeting to Bad Omen to Filler Word, and on your turn you claim one, tie it to an Aspect, and narrate how the community came to name that idea the way they did. Disagreement is part of the game; the table negotiates meaning together in the moment. The story advances through three Ages, and as the language grows more complete, the community's fate also comes into focus. By the end, players narrate the community's ending and explain why the language they built together is no longer spoken.

What do you need to start?

Everything is in the box: the hardcover rulebook, the full deck of Language cards, four core playsets, and eleven guest-designed playsets exploring different settings, alongside a digital copy included with every order. Three to five players and roughly three to four hours are all a group needs; there is no GM to prepare and nothing to read in advance beyond the rules themselves.

The book is upfront about emotional safety, laying out tools for checking in with the table early and often, since the themes of loss and cultural erasure can land close to home for some players.

Who is this game for?

Dialect suits groups who love wordplay, collaborative worldbuilding, and stories about identity, memory, and loss. If your table enjoys negotiating meaning together and building something that only exists because everyone contributed to it, this delivers an experience unlike almost anything else on our shelves.

It is a poor fit for players looking for combat, dice-driven stakes, or a GM guiding a plot toward a planned outcome. Every player is expected to actively invent and improvise, there is no passive seat at this table, so groups with a quiet member who prefers to follow rather than lead may find the format demanding.

How does it compare to other systems?

Against Dungeons & Dragons 5e, there is barely a comparison to make: no combat, no character sheets in the traditional sense, and no game master steering events. The entire experience is generated by the table's own choices about what a community believed and how it spoke.

Closer to home, The Quiet Year shares Dialect's GM-less, collaborative structure, both games hand authority to the table instead of one person, but where The Quiet Year maps a community's final year through the seasons, Dialect maps a language across generations. And its true sibling is Xenolanguage, built by the same designers on the same engine, which points the whole premise outward: instead of a dying human community, you are scientists building a shared tongue with an alien intelligence, inspired directly by the film Arrival.

Where do you start?

Read the Backdrop options together before committing to one; the choice shapes everything that follows, so it is worth a few minutes of discussion rather than picking the first option on the list. Once the Aspects and archetypes are set, let the first few Language cards move slowly. The rhythm of the game reveals itself after two or three rounds.

One piece of advice: let disagreements about a word's meaning play out at the table rather than rushing to consensus. Some of the game's best moments come from characters within the fiction disagreeing about what a word really means, which is exactly how real languages actually change.

Recommended products at Netherbook

Dialect is complete in one box, there is nothing else required to play. If the premise of building a shared language together resonates, Xenolanguage takes the same designers and the same core idea into first-contact science fiction, replacing a dying community with an alien one you are only beginning to understand. And if the GM-less, collaborative format is what drew you in rather than the language angle specifically, our The Quiet Year starter guide covers a kindred game about building and unraveling a community's final year together.