: Re: Using colloquialisms the reader may not be familiar with I'm from Ireland, most of my stories take place in Ireland, and many of my characters will speak with Irish accents and/or dialects to

@Goswami879

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Dialect used in dialogue can work well, especially when the writer is fluent. (Writers who aren't fluent in the dialect they're trying to use can make a mess of it.) Dialect is another aspect of how your characters speak. If you do it in a way that the meaning is either clear or supplied by context, your readers will be able to follow. Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon did this well; some of her Nigerian characters heavily used a pidgin English, and while I had the occasional "huh?" while reading, I was never lost. (She also included a glossary, which I didn't notice until I got to the end.)

Writing in first person from the POV of dialect-using character could be more of a strain for your readers. Readers want to be able to immerse themselves in a story, and have different levels of tolerance for things that throw them out of it. I suspect you'll find it easier to use dialect, without using a cabbagehead (or Watson) character, if you use third person instead of first person.

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