Living in the United States, a writer can fall into the trap of writing only English-speaking characters. That doesn’t accurately reflect the country’s linguistic makeup and with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter it’s possible that you “meet” non-English speakers on a daily basis.
I happened upon this story about four students at NYU who were profiled in the New York Times for producing a Facebook-alternative. That’s interesting in itself but the real story is what they did when they got their press coverage…
Says Gawker:
Four NYU students were lucky enough to get some New York Times coverage for their would-be Facebook killer. But they seem to have helped slip a nerdy sex joke past Times editors, as well.
The joke, written on a blackboard behind the students in their Times picture, is a sequence of Unix commands that could double as a crude hook-up manual: “touch grep unzip mount fsck fsck umount.”
As an exercise:
What lanaguage does your characters speak? Is it a common language or something only known to a few people? Do they speak other languages? Does the fact that they speak this language help or hurt their cause?
