Seeking Dialect Advice

i don't write in dialect, but I do, very judiciously, add in a foreign word that is easily recognizable here and there to remind the reader that my characters are speaking a foreign language. We will see what my editor thinks of that when the work in done.

I think too much dialog can get annoying fast. Use it lightly if you must.

Now I don't have any direct tips for you on how to write dialect, but an old friend of mine writes amazing dialect in some of her works and if you wanted someone in the spec fic field who writes dialect to study I would heartily commend Nalo Hopkinson's work to you.

 

It helped that he was a steam boat operator before the Civil War. He was constantly exposed to the same dialects every day for those years so he had time to observe and write down approximations.

 

One of my very favourite series of books as a child was the Redwall series and they were dialogue heavy beyond belief, with the Moles in particular using the most impenetrable west country burr. He sold 20m books exposing children to sentences like "Missus Spinnsey doant be unnerstandin' heagly burds. Doant ee wurry, zurr Berr'olly. They'm carnt talken propperly" and "Aye, an' thy ole grandad allus said you'm wurr ee most gurtly 'andsome creature. Noice ole beast ee wurr. Oi used to take 'im furr walks lest ee bump into trees. Bloind ee wurr, pore creetur!"

So, you can totally do really thick ones and succeed. Just you'll have lots of people complaining as well as lots of people liking it.

As for how to do it? Listen to people with accents and read prose written in accent.

 

Personally, I wouldn't go there. Not heavily anyhow. I have the urge to go nuts sometimes and I always rap my fingers with a yardstick. I look at it this way, if you're going for traditional publication your MS is going to end up in a pile somewhere whether agent or publisher, and it's going to have to get past the first firewall, which may or may not be the actual agent, and at a pub, it's almost guaranteed it hits a reader who filters out junk first. The last thing you want is some poor bastard who has to read your work amongst 20 others on a given day to toss your MS in the scrap pile because the dialogue is thick and slow, muddied by dialect.

So, if you do, make sure it reads well.

In addition, for a unpub'd writer, it's going to be fairly difficult to stay perfectly consistent and keep that voice just right. Can it be done? Absolutely. But it's got a good shot at being more of a hurdle than a plus.

 

Just a guess, I've never read Redwall, but of those who love the series, I'd bet a high % didn't love that dialogue. But then when I was younger I was more tolerant of these things. Now? I'd just put the book down. Done.

I think screenwriting kind of destroyed my tolerance for reading dialect. Sentence structure, word choice, contractions, even irregular words (gonna might fly), made up words, great! Start throwing in apostrophes and your script gets the heave-ho because you're directing the actor. To me, heavy dialect in fiction is similar to directing the director/actor, except you're directing the reader (much the same as "he shouted") and worse it threatens to slow down the reader and make them say the dreaded, "huh?" and make them read it twice or three times to get it.

Clockwork Orange manages dialect superbly, but it really is a part of the book. There is a reason the language is the way it is. Faulkner, Twain, writers replicating a real world dialect in a real world setting are more apt to get away with it. If in a fantasy/sci-fi setting where the characters wouldn't be speaking English anyhow, it seems damned funky to me when a character appears to break into a southern twang, or some such. If Boromir has an accent, tell me he has a Gondorian accent, and use word selection and sentence structure to more subtly indicate it, or do nothing at all. Just tell me, or don't. My personal opinion is that it's a heavy handed technique best used in small doses, and is more often used as a cheap method to create "voice" for a character in otherworld fiction, meaning not Earth. Attempting to replicate dialect for an earth based story makes more sense.

 

Even reading that excerpt hurt my head and I stopped after 5 words :-D

I'm of the camp that modifying a precious few words to get the point across works better than laying it on thick.

One of my characters has a sort-of "Southern, American" accent so I tend t' drop extra vowels on a few words here an' there t' get the point across. But mostly I use vocabulary and slang to show accent.

 

Write examples and have different people read it out loud. You will soon learn what works and what doesn't.

 

Yes, people can react very differently. I have some in the novel I am working on and some in my writer's group were very positive and others the complete opposite. The plus for me was there were are lot more who reacted positively. This has given me the confidence to leave it in.

 

Watch movies or TV shows that depict the dialects you want to choose and transcribe them to text to get the sounds you want.