The first decade of my life, my tongue went into hiding as I avoided words with the letter R, the one sound I could not pronounce. This speech impediment, rhotacism, can be common in toddlers, but mine outstayed its welcome. You and I have been dating for so long that you know this about me now: I choose my words carefully. Even back then, before we met, if I were approaching each sentence like a recipe, then R was the spice I would substitute with a new ingredient, another word, a synonym like cinnamon, so that each sentence came out not-quite-right but would have to suffice. I could not say rose or romance, could not say relationship or reaching. Instead, I pronounced each R like a W, approximating words I could easily approach… wave, waiting, weakness.

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Let there be language, I might as well have said when I recently ordered the elaborate card game called Dialect. Lately, I’ve fancied myself a connoisseur and collector of writerly games—Metaphor Dice, for example, or Paint Chip Poetry. But I wanted Dialect because it felt weightier, more personal, the stakes higher: its players risk losing control of the language they create. The creators claim their game is about language and how it dies, describing it this way: 

“Dialect is a game about an isolated community, their language, and what it means for that language to be lost. In this game, you’ll tell the story of the Isolation by building their language. New words will come from the fundamental aspects of the community: who they are, what they believe in, and how they respond to a changing world. Players take away both the story they’ve told and the dialect they’ve built together.”

On the cover of this instructional book, each letter spelling D-I-A-L-E-C-T, was a piece of wood set on fire—a tree dying piece by piece, pulp to pulp, page over potential page, a language ablaze in its landscape.

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I was eight years old when the old woman at church asked me what I saw in Yellowstone, and I wanted to tell her about the geysers—their waters erupting, their sulfurous smell—but I could not think of an R-less way to say it. So, I tried my best to say geyser, tried to raise the R like a dead savior from the once-closed tomb of my tongue, but she couldn’t understand my version of the word. The tall and popular girl at church grabbed me by the arm, pulling me across the room until I was face-to-face with the boy we both liked. Say red, she demanded of me, laughing. I could not say this color that was flowering from my cheeks, flaring through the birthmark between my eyebrows, a sudden distress signal, a leak beneath my pale and paper-thin skin. My inner world felt equally urgent and indecipherable. 

Another excerpt from Dialect:

“What happens when a language is lost? The world takes another step towards sameness and we lose a shade of humanity. [ . . .] In order to fight this future, we must fight to understand it.”

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One theory about rhotacism is that it can, in some cases, be caused by abnormal mouth structure. Is that why the dentist discovered a sea of tooth tissue in between my normal teeth? Had my mouth—my word-womb—always been off-kilter? Shark teeth is how the dentist described these complex layers before proceeding to dig them out, one by one by one. In my half-conscious and drug-induced state, as I listened to the sound of his drilling break through my adolescent body, I had a vividly technicolor dream that my mouth was an excavation site, being mined deep down for precious oils and minerals. The crane of the oil rig was royal purple, the sky alive with a salmon-pink pulse and silver-scaled moon. My fierce fish mouth—the wrongness of it—was, as it turns out, a bundle of potential, an ocean in the desert. 

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“Some will choose to barricade themselves against an unforgiving world while others lie stranded and adrift from home. On their own, one thing is certain—these people will be left to simmer in what makes them special. They will change because of it. You will decide what they become.”

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I must have been 10 years old when I realized I could finally solve for R, could say the word answer, in this phase of rapid change when the rosy mark above my nose began to fade, as if one symbol exchanged for another in the equation of my sense of self. Alone in the basement, watching television, knees to the green carpet, I listened intently to each word from the screen and whispered them back to myself, letting the accuracy of these R words roll around on my tongue, newly resonant, someone else’s voice planted into mine. This small piece of the English-speaking puzzle had been closed off to me for so long. Now that I had access to it, I did not know how to act or celebrate—whether to run upstairs and recite every R entry of the encyclopedia defiantly to my siblings, or whether to relish the discovery a little longer, as if a delicate secret. 

“Each turn you will advance the story of the Isolation and root that change in language. In this way, the language and the story will be bound together.”

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In Disney’s rendition of The Little Mermaid, the sea witch Ursula arranges an exchange with Ariel: the mermaid can become fully human only if she spills her voice into the curves of Ursula’s seashell necklace, a loan from one throat to another. 

I gifted my voice once too, remember? You left me in the quiet corner of my breakfast nook for hours, an impromptu recording studio to capture my vocal cords. The donation was for a good cause—this “human voice bank” project would use my voice recordings to create a digital voice for the medically speechless—but it was also, for me, a small act of redemption, my words newly worthy of sharing, lessening the sting of being let go from a receptionist role where I was told that my voice was too quiet on the phone. In the same breath as they were asking me to leave, the CEO complimented me on my other voice, my writing voice, expressing satisfaction with the press releases I’d written for them between calls. 

The voice from our body, after all, is just a cover for the voice inside our head. The mermaid’s new legs let her walk into the world, but without her song, she finds new ways to communicate. When I was younger, I couldn’t say repair or remain, renew or rescue, but I could write everything with precision, and the page pronounced each word perfectly on my behalf.

“As the game progresses, the language the players make together will bend, change, and eventually break as the story of the Isolation comes to an end.”

I still have the photo you took of me wading through the shallow waters of Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, where your shadow’s hand holds my shadow’s hand while our physical bodies remain far apart. What’s the word for that—for moving through the world in such a way that we are equally connected and separated, our reality layered and malleable?

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Long ago, when my family was in search of parking for the shoreline, my dad stopped our blue Astro van to ask an elderly couple for directions. I watched from my back-row window as the coastal wind swayed these lovers like a lullaby. For each word the old man spoke—describing every turn while motioning his hands—the old woman mouthed the same in silence, trailing seconds behind, her speechless echo allowing his words a certain weight. I could not tell if she was mute or slow to process the moment or something else entirely. What I found extraordinary about this woman in this moment was that she managed to marry the word and its absence in her mouth like a ceremony. The shoreline woman represented the liminal space between silence and speech, between solitude and outreach. 

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“Over the course of the game, you will create new words off the fundamental traits of the community, the pivotal events that have defined their lives, and how they respond to a changing world.”

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I think back to when you were driving as I was reading from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and the author’s invention of new words inspired us to follow suit. I wanted a word for everything on our route: the singular intensity of water-soaked leaves, the sun setting in my peripheral vision. I wanted to create a language that could reintroduce us to what had been here all along.

When I first heard you pronounce ramen as lamen, I misheard it as a blessing of amen. The L was as soft and billowing as the W—the R substitute—that once leaked from my speech. Then your father said ramen in the same gentle way and then your brother. It took my R-strung mind some time to realize that the Japanese tongue of your heritage does not speak the English R, does not even need the sound of the letter I spent so long lacking. Someone writes online that “the Japanese R approximates the English one but with a click, a tongue tap against the hard palate.”

“Language is the logic of your internal clockwork [ . . .] the markers for your culture and identity are embedded within it.”

At the heart of pronunciation is a navigation of space: fluctuating curvature of tongue, teeth, cheek, ceiling of a single mouth. Your tongue could approximate mine, and my tongue yours, the sand and water of our languages overlapping.