Back in August 2008 I posted a suggestion on this comm about gathering information on how the Strawhats talk and address each other. I included examples of how it might look for Luffy and Zoro. Over time I expanded the original entry until it encompassed all the Strawhats, with plenty of helpful pointers from posters in the thread. The old entry is still there, but as the context of the presentation is different now, it occurred to me it might be good to repost what I’ve got. (Mods, please let me know if this is a problem.) Edit: And here's another post focusing on the way they speak in general, written by someone far more qualified than I am on these matters./edit

So when I started interacting with the fandom and reading people’s fics, I got really confused by the way some folks were writing dialogue for Lan Wangji; he often sounded super awkward, spoke in fragments, and sometimes exclusively in third person. To be fair, all of those are elements of his speech at various times, but like, seeing it in English-language material felt like a really heavy-handed way of rendering it in translation?

Once upon a time, in a land about twelve hours north of here, I was in the second year of grad school and really regretting all my life choices. Because the professor of the sociolinguistics class I was taking was a post-doc living several states away from her fellow-academic husband, she felt the same and gave our class completely free rein in picking our final paper topic. Since watching Firefly was the only thing that had given me joy that semester, I decided to examine the pidginization of Chinese and English in that universe.

"I had a question for the Peak Lord," says Luo Binghe, voice sweet, eyes cold. "A dialect question." If Shang Qinghua was sweating before, he's dripping fucking rivers now. He and Cucumber-bro communicate in a horrible mix of memes, internet slang, Chinglish and modern Chinese, mostly but not entirely incomprehensible for any outsider. Luo Binghe had decided it must be some hometown dialect that they shared, despite any evidence of Shen Qingqui and Shang Qinghua ever speaking to each other before they both had the shitty luck to be transmigrated, and devoted himself to learning his beloved Shizun's birth dialect. Fuck! Why was Shang Qinghua dumb enough to have made it a plot point that Luo Binghe had a god level ability to pick up languages! .... right, so he could pick up some girl's dialect and seduce her more easily, but it wasn't fair that this monogamous version of his son could still do it, okay!!