Scarlett's Tips: Thoughts On Writing Dialect
Today I have a guest, Scarlett R. Algee, a fantastic writer and editor coming to you with some seriously good tips on writing dialect. Let me cut to the chase so you can learn and enjoy!
Oh, dialect. An excellent way to add color and dimension to your characters’ speech, but so very hard to write well, and so easy to write badly/offensively.
Let’s take a short look at what dialect is, what it isn’t, what some examples can look like, and what you can do to use it more effectively.
What Dialect Is, and Isn’t
Dialect is the set of grammatical and verbal distinctions that sets speakers of a language in one region apart from speakers of the same language in another region. It’s why your relatives in Maine may have a somewhat different vocabulary than your relatives in California. It’s why speakers of British English tend to say “got” as the past tense of “get,” rather than the “gotten” of American English. It’s why we have not-at-all heated discussions over the correct usage of “soft drink,” “soda,” and “pop.” Dialect is, at bottom, about regionalized vocabulary and grammar.
What dialect isn’t about: pronunciation. When you imagine, for example, someone from the American South pronouncing “all right” as something like “aight,” or “can’t” as “caint,” that’s not dialect; it’s accent. They’re related, but very much two separate things. Anyone can pronounce words in a way that catches the ear, while still adhering to the standard grammar rules of their language.
Examples of Dialect
I could give lots of examples of how dialect is written, but for the sake of brevity, here are two.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror”
“I dun’t keer what folks think—ef Lavinny’s boy looked like his pa, he wouldn’t look like nothin’ ye expeck.”
That’s just one sentence out of many, many Lovecraft examples I could give, and it’s one of the better ones. In standard English, it would read “I don’t care what folks think—if Lavinia’s boy looked like his father, he wouldn’t look like anything you expect”—and, in fact, none of the intended meaning would be lost. The phonetic renderings—“keer” and “expeck”—are unnecessarily awkward, but we’ll talk about that in a bit.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
“S’pose we must be resigned; but oh Lord! how ken I? If I know’d anything whar you’s goin’, or how they’d sarve you! Missis says she’ll try and ‘deem ye, in a year or two; but Lor! nobody never comes up that goes down thar! They kills ‘em! I’ve hearn ‘em tell how dey works ‘em up on dem ar plantations.”
I can’t claim to be any kind of expert on African-American Vernacular English (not that Stowe would’ve known that phrase), but my default setting is Southern, so I can render this in modern standard English thus:
“I suppose we must be resigned, but oh Lord! how can I? If I knew anything [of] where you’re going or how they’d treat you! Missus says she’ll try and redeem you, in a year or two, but Lord! nobody ever comes back that goes down there! They kill them! I’ve heard them tell how they work them on those plantations.”
Ugh.
I really, really tried to come up with an example of good dialect in fiction, but alas, Google failed me in providing any sort of consensus on “good.” (Opinions welcome; my source list below has various examples.)
Writing Dialect to Your Advantage
Notice that in both Lovecraft’s and Stowe’s examples, the dialogue serves to “other” the speakers—specifically, to set them apart as poor, rural, uneducated, and undesirable. This happens because a lot of writers think they’re writing “dialect” by writing character speech phonetically: they pepper their dialogue with things like fer, wuz, dis, dat, bettah, nevah, waddah. (Bonus points if you can sort all that out.)
Don’t do this. First of all, writing a character’s speech phonetically (see Stowe, above) is a good way to alienate readers by making your dialogue unreadable. Weird spellings that aren’t easy to interpret will make a lot of readers put the book down (or throw it across the room). Secondly, phonetic writing almost always is used to set one character or group apart from another character or group in an unflattering way. If all your white characters speak standard English, but all your non-white characters speak in clumps of bad spelling, your readers will make unpleasant assumptions about YOU.
So what can you do? Lots of things, but here are a few.
1. Research the dialect you want to write. Where it’s used, by whom, in what time period. Don’t focus on the sound; focus on the vocabulary. Remember, the important thing is what’s said, not how it’s pronounced.
2. Listen to real people. This is an extension of #1, but unless you plan to use a historical dialect that’s now defunct, paying attention to the speech patterns of folks on the subway or on the bus or in the Walmart checkout line will help you, and it’s free. (If you are using a defunct dialect, try YouTube and hope for the best.)
3. Study a foreign language. You don’t have to go for fluency; using an app like Duolingo will suffice. Trying to attain correctness in an unfamiliar language will make you pay attention to your own speech patterns, which is unbelievably useful.
4. Do not—do not—write phonetically. You’ll have readers who are disappointed and offended, and you’ll look like you don’t know what you’re doing.
There. I might oughta writ more, but this was a fair to middlin’ start. (See what I did there?) Now go forth and write awesomely, aight?
Scarlett R. Algee’s editing work includes The Cronian Incident and The Scalpel (both from Castrum Press); she’s also edited and contributed to the bestselling anthologies Explorations: War and Explorations: Colony (Woodbridge Press). Her fiction has been published by Body Parts Magazine, Pen of the Damned, and The Wicked Library, among other places, and her short story “Dark Music,” written for the podcast The Lift, was a 2016 Parsec Awards finalist. She lives in rural Tennessee with a beagle and an uncertain number of cats, skulks on Twitter at @scarlettralgee, and blogs occasionally at scarlettralgee.wordpress.com.
Sources and Further Reading
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/what-is-the-difference-between-dialect-and-accent/
http://www.justaboutwrite.com/A_Archive_Uses-Abuses-Dialect.html
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/writing-accents-and-dialects
https://literarydevices.net/dialect/
https://www.writingforward.com/news-announcements/guest-posts/practical-advice-for-writing-dialect
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