Criminal character's voice

I say don't use dialect unless you are VERY familiar with it (as in, you grew up surrounded by it).

If you want a Southern dialect, though, you'll have to specify where exactly in the South he comes from, because there's not one "Southern dialect" homogenous throughout the region.

As for showing he's a criminal...rough, harsh manner, lots of profanity...idk. From that he could also be a middle school boy, lol...

 

Your best bet would be to search Google for "Southern U.S. Slang" or "Southern U.S. Dialect."

The problem is that different areas of the South will have different slang/dialect. Louisiana slang will be different than South Carolina slang. Even within a state, different areas will use some different terms.

So maybe once you determine where your criminal called home, you could narrow down the search, maybe search for some documentaries about that area, with interviews or great acting so you can listen to the speech.

If you are using only a handful of terms, you can run into trouble if those are terms unlikely to be spoken in isolation. For instance, in the link above on Louisiana, the blog writer says he switched to "come here" from "come see" after moving to New York and discovering how confused his acquaintances would be when he said, "Come see!" So if you chose to use "come see" but much of the rest of the vocabulary used by the character was not laced with slang, it might come across as facile tokenism. On the other hand, some Southern phrasing like "Ya'll" might be a harder habit to break—in part, because people from the North will understand it.

Here's a long list, a glossary, but it doesn't split the terms up into geographic areas: A Glossary of Southern Accents * alphaDictionary

 

I'm not sure searching Google is the best idea....you'll get a lot of over-exaggerated, sarcastic or plain disrespectful representations. There's a lot of stuff out there that's meant for humor. You see, there's quite a bit of stigma surrounding the southern accent/dialect, and lots of people assume it means you're stupid and uneducated.

That said, it might give you an idea of things people say. If you do your character's dialect based on a Google search, it might sound kind of disrespectful because it's a dialect that people really like to make fun of.

If you specify a specific state, you might get better results.

I'm from the south, so I'm surrounded by this stuff and I've heard a lot of the dialects. Dialects are very different in different parts of the south. For example, "y'all," the quintessential "Southern" word. My grandmother (I call her Mamaw--not sure if that is southern or not) is from North Carolina and says something that sounds like "yinz" (I guess derives from "you'uns) to mean the same thing. Never heard her say "y'all." Kentucky will be different from Louisiana, which will be different from Georgia, and so on.

Something I say: "How come?" To mean "why?" Not sure if this is southern or not.

I should ask my mother about this...she would know.

 

Documentaries are a great idea, though. Absolutely figure out which state specifically he comes from.

 

Yeah, I mentioned documentaries because a simple Google search—for anything whatsoever, not only slang/dialect—may have no context if one isn't conscientious in the searching. But having a place to start, for someone entirely unfamiliar with Southern dialect, is a good idea. If nothing else, the variety of search results can make one pause.

I'm in an odd position myself, because I grew up in southern Missouri with relatives in Arkansas, a handful from Texas, and some in-laws from Mississippi. I grew up around it, particularly my mother's side of the family. Ya'll, young'uns, fixin's (food, not to be confused with fixin', "fixin' to leave"), and on and on. But although I grew up thick in it, I've spent most of my life trying not to speak it, and so although I'd have a much easier time writing in that dialect than someone from the U.K. or maybe New York, I'd be looking it up on Google to refresh my decades of experience hearing it. It's not exactly natural for me.

Edit: I would add, also, that not everyone in my neck of the woods speaks thickly in the dialect, and there seems to be a generational difference as well. But some do, and even many of those who don't will have bits and pieces of the dialect/slang. I think one major mistake is to assume that everyone in the South speaks the same.

 

I saw on one of those Q&A sites someone make the joke that in Texas the plural is "All y'all."

 

The way I understand it, "y'all" refers to more than one person, whereas "all y'all" refers to a large group.

 

I have never heard it refer to one person...

 

The Wikipedia page on the word mentions a singular usage but that it's a 1/100 occurrence rate, and WP makes the generalization that people in the South will argue it's supposed to always be plural.

Maybe the confusion is when it's spoken to one person, as if referring to that single individual, but the connotation is along the lines of "you and your folks." (I ripped the example from the Wiki.)

As an aside, I was pleased to discover that the Wiki page mentioned an Ozarks variant, "you'uns," which is something I heard a lot from some family members as I was growing up.

As another aside, I was discussing these things with my mother the other day about my dad's father who used some distinctive Ozarks hillbilly terminology that was quite different than her family's Ozarks vernacular. His children and their children didn't quite pick that up, and now that he's gone it seems lost to me. I don't remember it well.

 

As opposed to Mythic Scribes where only the gods gather.

 

Was it the Washington Monument?

Earlier in this thread, DOTA mentioned not trusting a Google search, and for me it's all the same. An abundance of information, but requiring care, a comparison and evaluation of multiple sources, and individual discernment. I use Wikipedia often, but my natural tendency is skeptical intrigue, whether I get my info there, here, or anywhere. I've been known to settle on an idea merely as one step in a process of evaluation. ("Okay, let's put this on a pedestal and see how long it survives!")