Dialects are overlays on the standard, never edits to it. The coursebook (coursebook/nelo-kel-coursebook.md) is Standard Nelôxi and remains the single canon. Each overlay describes how a variety transforms the standard — regular correspondence rules plus a short dialect-specific lexicon — so overlays stay in sync automatically as canon grows. No word is ever re-coined for a dialect.

Saharannaise is not here — it is not a dialect. The Nelôxi of Atlanta (Nelôxia's sovereign sister state on the Atlantic Saharan coast) is a co-standard, not an overlay: it runs the full Nelôxi grammar and reroots the domestic lexicon wholesale in Hassaniya Arabic and Zenaga Berber, governed from its own seat. A pluricentric peer of the coursebook (Lisbon ↔ Brasília), not a rural variety of it. It lives at the top level in ../saharannaise/, with the shared grammar-and- orthography spine in ../saharannaise/COMMON-REGISTER.md.

The real structure: one metrolect (with a gradient) + one rural dialect #

The port (Königsberg), the capital (~30 km inland), and the border city (Marīsô / Slavic Marzeja) form a single metropolitan area. Their speech has converged into one metrolect, not three dialects. What looks like variation inside the metroplex is a register gradient, not a dialect boundary:

	Variety	What it is
metrolect/	Metroplex Nelôxi (Sadāmkēļ)	The everyday language of the whole conurbation — majority variety, economically dominant, favored by the traveled. Contains an internal prestige gradient: harbor-clip end (casual, worldly) ⇄ capital-standard end (official — this end is the coursebook). Educated speakers command both and slide between them. Its border edge is Slavicized (see below).
inland/	Inland Nelôxi (Nurôkēļ)	The one true dialect boundary — everything beyond commuter reach. Conservative, Finnic-heavy, loan-resistant, longest/most-harmonized forms.
tristine/	Tristine Nelôxi	The Adriatic port dialect (Triest, the Friuli littoral, the Dalmatian coast). Keeps the full grammar and the domestic core; tilts two thin Romance-Venetian layers — the courtesy words and the port-legal-commercial register (the "two-move" pattern: a Latinate regulated verb + an added documentary element, transitā … manifestôn). A dialect, not a reroot; it may bend a standard rule where the register needs it.

Script overlays are a separate, thinner kind of overlay: same language, different writing system. Uusatôm (Odessa), the founding-diaspora Black Sea city, writes Metropolitan Nelôxi in full Cyrillic — uusatom/uusatom-cyrillic.md — a two-script border tradition, not a spoken dialect. (Its mixed-script sibling, Magau's hanzi + Latin, belongs to Meralian and lives at ../mare/magau-script.md.)

The standard (coursebook) is the prestige register because it is the capital's, not because it is anyone's mother tongue. Königsberg is bigger and where most people actually speak, but law and schooling use the capital end of the metrolect.

The four strata, geographically distributed #

Finnic core (everywhere, strongest inland) · Low German trade crust (metroplex) · Scandinavian colloquial (harbor/metroplex) · Slavic (entered at the border city Marīsô, spread inward across the metroplex; absent from inland and from the literary standard). The metrolect is where all four meet; inland is nearly pure Finnic. This multi-directional contact is the point — Nelôxi is a Finnic core under Germanic + Scandinavian + Slavic pressure, not a copy of any one neighbor.