Conveying two different spoken languages in the same text

[overlordror]

Hello!

Recently I've gotten a muse for a world in which a young woman is taken from what is considered civilized society into a group of tribal people who live a semi-nomadic lifestyle. These people speak an entirely different language from the young woman, so she's having to learn through gestures and the one person of tribal descent who does speak her language.

How can I properly convey the difficulty of two different languages in one setting? One example suggested to me was to have those who are speaking Vanari, the tribal language, be in italics so the reader knows that it is different from the Common language that is found at the beginning of the books. The problem I have with this is that writing in English and italics to denote language is a fine choice, but what if you want to use the specific Vanari word for something? Is peppering in these foreign terms acceptable so long as they've been properly explained?

For example, one of the beliefs of these tribal people is that there is a Mother Mare that takes care of them all. In their language, she is called anne kisrak. After that initial introduction, is it more acceptable to just continue to call any reference to this mother mare?

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

I'm not certain I understand your question but I'll take a stab.

I've read things like this where italics are used as you described, with the word that people want attention drawn to written in normal text, within the italic sentence.

If you're asking if you can use the foreign word freely once it's explained, I'd say yes, as long as its been explained well enough. This is usually not all that hard and doesn't require much. We, as readers, can also learn more about the term as the story moves forward.

 

[Shreddies]

That's an interesting idea.

If the young woman is the viewpoint character, I don't know if it would make sense to show what the foreign words mean, since they initially don't mean anything to her. You could show some short phrases for the audience to hear (in the Vanari's language), then as the character learns more of the language more of the words are written in English.

I think it's fine to refer to continue referring to her as Mother Mare if they're using their native language. You can also use fluency to dictate what language they're speaking, at least in the case of the native that can speak the woman's language. He would be fluent in his mother tongue, but maybe his English is a little broken? And vice versa for the woman (as she learns their language).

Either way I would suggest reserving the italics for when she is trying to speak their language (with varying levels of success, perhaps?). I'm not sure about other people, but I don't enjoy reading walls of italic text.

 

[overlordror]

I've entertained what you said at the end there, Shreddies. I know italics can be hard to read for some people but I wasn't sure the gradual shift from italics to normal text would properly convey that this young woman has slowly become fluent in the Vanari language instead of the reader thinking everyone is suddenly speaking the common tongue.

Another question that comes to light is what to do when others from this civilized society come into play later on. She spends most of her time with these tribal people, but eventually does meet her own people again. I don't want to diminish the significance of that by having everything with no differentiation in language, since it's an important aspect of the story.

 

[Ireth]

I've entertained what you said at the end there, Shreddies. I know italics can be hard to read for some people but I wasn't sure the gradual shift from italics to normal text would properly convey that this young woman has slowly become fluent in the Vanari language instead of the reader thinking everyone is suddenly speaking the common tongue.

This makes me think of the movie The Thirteenth Warrior. The MC, an Arab, finds himself among a dozen Viking warriors. At first he doesn't understand any of their language, and the movie reflects that by presenting the language as itself; as the Arab grows more and more fluent, gradually the viking language is represented more and more as English. It's finally all English when he knows enough to understand whole conversations and even join in (much to the Vikings' surprise, when they insult him in their tongue and he does so right back. XD).

 

[Shreddies]

Well, if that's the case then why limit yourself to italic/non-italic? You can use two different fonts for the language, go ahead and paint the fourth wall a bit!

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

Or as Ireth is suggesting, invent the other language.

 

[overlordror]

The other language is an invention that's incorporated into the story. It's based on modern turkish so I have a go-to reference for words, but the language itself is entirely its own.

 

[wordwalker]

...
At first he doesn't understand any of their language, and the movie reflects that by presenting the language as itself; as the Arab grows more and more fluent, gradually the viking language is represented more and more as English. It's finally all English when he knows enough to understand whole conversations.

I think this is the way to go. It's a variation of the practice that you don't spell out someone's accent (or not usually, unless he's an exotic walk-in character), you write the meaning of what he says. Italics and other formats would clear, but they draw too much attention to a fact that is going to become less and less visible the more your MC learns.

Most books I know with a similar plot use the same methods.