: 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

@Carla500

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The simple answer is that your reviewer didn't know what the hell they were talking about. Not in terms of Irish colloquialisms, nor even in terms of literature. As far as reviewing goes, they're so ignorant that they're not even wrong.

Pretty much as long as there has been English literature, authors have written for colloquialisms and accents, whether that was for effect or simply to try to accurately represent how people in an area would talk. Shakespeare's mechanicals talk very differently from other characters, as do all his lower-class characters. Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens both used phonetic representation of dialect extensively. And coming more up-to-date, Irvine Welsh's books use Scottish dialect throughout, even for the narration. It's easy to fill in authors between all those points, and English-language authors from other countries (particularly the US and Canada). The point to take away though is that you're right and they are wrong, unless they think that Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens and Welsh are not considered significant authors!

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