Yuffie's Writing How-To's

How to write ACCENTS AND DIALECTS

Fantastic article by Arlene Prunkl at http://penultimateword.com/fiction/dialect-in-dialogue-how-to-write-authentic-dialect-and-foreign-accents/ (linked to in the External Link):

Dialogue in fiction: Part I – How to write authentic dialects and foreign accents

Of the many things to master when writing dialogue in fiction, creating authentic dialects and natural-sounding foreign accents for your characters is possibly the most challenging. If you don’t get the accent just right, you risk having your characters come off looking like caricatures. Worse, you alienate readers, who don’t like being slowed and confused by a lot of nonstandard spellings. And worst of all, you may appear to be discriminatory or even ignorant by inadvertently stereotyping your characters through how you portray their accents. In this post, I’ll take a look at ways to make your characters’ English dialects and foreign accents as realistic as possible without reducing them to goofy stereotypes.

The English language is the lingua franca of our modern world. All over the world, people in foreign countries are learning English to help them with communications in business, finance, medicine, science, technology, and many other fields. The number of people in the world speaking English with a foreign accent has never been greater. Add to that the fact that in virtually every part of the English-speaking world, different regions and ethnicities speak English differently, and chances are you have at least one character in your novel who speaks with an accent.

Accents are caused by the influence of a speaker’s native language or native dialect on the English words they speak. The differences can be found in pronunciation, diction (word choice), syntax (word order), grammar (how parts of speech are structured), and idiom (peculiarities of certain phrases). Accent and dialect can convey differences in ethnicity, geography, demographics, class, education, and culture. Even standard English is a dialect.

Nonstandard spellings and contractions
When you’re reading a novel with characters who speak with foreign accents or in dialect, how much misspelling can you tolerate in their dialogue? Probably not much—today’s readers don’t have much patience for puzzling out phonetic spellings and odd contractions. (A contraction is any word or set of words that uses an apostrophe to replace any dropped letter or letters: ’Tis th’ night b’fo’ Christmas, an’ I’s fixin’ t’go carolin’ wi’ y’all.)

This is quite a change from 150 years or so ago. Back in the 19th century, it was in vogue to capture every scrap of phonetic pronunciation to render a character realistic. Twain, Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe are a few authors who took pains to achieve this. Look at this example from Huckleberry Finn (1884), and see if you don’t find it just slightly annoying:

Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin’ en grab her up in my arms, en say, ‘Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Amighty fogive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as long’s he live!’ Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb—en I’d ben atreat’n her so!

Most readers today become annoyed quickly by this kind of writing, where almost every word needs to be examined to decipher its pronunciation and meaning. It’s distracting; it slows readers down, pulls them out of the story, out of the “fictional dream” you worked so hard to create. They may end up paying less attention to what’s being said than to how it’s being said.

Nobody speaks English the way it’s spelled
Everybody who speaks English has an accent to others not in their region or ethnic group. And almost nobody truly pronounces English the way it’s spelled. Even someone with little trace of an English accent might say, “I wanned us t’go to th’movie, bu’ we godda do th’shoppin’ first.” Not even the Queen’s English comes out the way it’s spelled (far from it—think about all those dropped Rs). Among some of the most overdone written accents and dialects are “Southernese” from the American South, African American English, British cockney, and Scottish or Irish brogue.