Style-shifting? Dialects? People Saying Stuff?

Kitty Pryde · Jul 29, 2009

I'm getting all bothered about dialogue in a couple of WIPs--I'm not sure if I'm just overthinking it. Any guidance is welcome.

1. (Assuming a book in the POV of an American, as that's what I've got,) How do I know if my attempts at writing dialects other than standard american english are going overboard or not? I'm trying to do minimal alternative spelling and grammar...but how do I know where to draw the line? I'm trying to create the sound of it without creating annoyance or difficulty in reading. (I realize there is probably a world of debate to be had over the term 'standard american english'...I mean as it is taught in schools, I think. Anyway, not trying to start that debate

)

2. Style-shifting (in the linguistic sense of a person speaking in two different ways, not like, a murder mystery suddenly mutating into a romance novel)--can this work or am I just going to cause confusion? I've got some characters who each use two significantly different dialects, with good reason to switch between the two (for example, African-Caribbean British dialect vs. some variety of londoner dialect/toned-down RP). It wouldn't be a major plot point, but it would be a decent amount of character development. Can it work? Without causing confusion? Or making it look I just got sloppy and mixed up my accents/dialects? And any good examples of novels with characters that do it?

Thanks!

(ETA: I put this in novels specifically because I'm talking about evolving/depicting a characters voice over the course of a whole long novel.)

efkelley · Jul 29, 2009

It could very well get sloppy and could be very difficult to keep straight.

1 - How to tell if it's overboard.
If the character can be misunderstood by the reader, it's overboard. Your goal to create the sound without creating annoyance or difficulty is a noble one. My best advice is to not alter the word too much. Have you seen that email that makes the rounds every year where all the words are misspelled, but you can read it just fine? Teh one wehre ervey wrod has its carachters out of wahck? But all the words start and end with the same letter of their proper spelling and usually contain all the proper letters, but they're just jumbled. Something like that might serve. Obviously when copying an accent, the interior letters are going to be different than the proper spelling, but maybe making the bracketing letters the same as their proper spelling might help. That's just a thought. I've never tried it.

2 - Style Shifting
That can work just fine so long as they have a good reason to do so and you make it clear who is who. By that I mean dissimilar names and not changing their identities to the reader. Someone can take on an alias, but you might consider still referring to them as Mister X in your dialog instead of Professor Y.

As an aside, this thread has made me reflect on why I don't use dialects more myself. I think it's because I really hate inconsistency, and I know that I would probably write them very inconsistently. A way around this might be to create my own dictionary of spellings within a specific dialect and refer to it frequently. The other problem being how to get a consistent sampling of those dialects. Being in Texas, I can write a pretty consistent drawl, but a Boston accent would baffle me.

So, it occurs that many local news channels offer newscasts via the web. Now, most newsfolk speak in fairly un-accented American, but most local newscasts are likely to have interviews with local people. It's those folks that I should watch for and then write down every last thing they say in exactly the way they say it.

That could be an interesting project.

Kitty Pryde · Jul 29, 2009

efkelley said:
It could very well get sloppy and could be very difficult to keep straight.

1 - How to tell if it's overboard.
If the character can be misunderstood by the reader, it's overboard. Your goal to create the sound without creating annoyance or difficulty is a noble one. My best advice is to not alter the word too much. Have you seen that email that makes the rounds every year where all the words are misspelled, but you can read it just fine? Teh one wehre ervey wrod has its carachters out of wahck? But all the words start and end with the same letter of their proper spelling and usually contain all the proper letters, but they're just jumbled. Something like that might serve. Obviously when copying an accent, the interior letters are going to be different than the proper spelling, but maybe making the bracketing letters the same as their proper spelling might help. That's just a thought. I've never tried it.

2 - Style Shifting
That can work just fine so long as they have a good reason to do so and you make it clear who is who. By that I mean dissimilar names and not changing their identities to the reader. Someone can take on an alias, but you might consider still referring to them as Mister X in your dialog instead of Professor Y.

I usually only alternatively-spell a handful of common words. But it's often necessary to change the first or last letters.

And I don't mean a character taking on an alias or another identity, I just mean speaking two different ways (umm, I wracks my brain for another example: a first-generation American-born kid with Mexican parents, who speaks standard american english in the classroom, speaks Spanish to her parents, and speaks a very specific mixture of the two to her siblings. She's the same person all the time. I don't have that actual character, she's just an example.)

PS There are loads of dialect databases online, where you can listen to all sorts of people talking. Some are academic/linguistic resources, some are actors' resources.

dawinsor · Jul 29, 2009

At one time, dialect appeared in novels more than it does now. Currently, I'd say the practice it not to try to recreate the sound of a dialect, but maybe to use a word or two to remind the reader of how the character sounds. You can say )once) that the speaker had a southern accept and use "y'all" in the sentences and you're fine. Or have the narrator comment occasionally. So a character says, "The car was dumping oil," and the narrator observes that the last word sounds like "all."

If the speaker isn't a native English speaker, you can do a lot with slightly altered word order or an omitted word ("I go now" or "Is this library?").

In general, don't make the reader come out of the story and work to decipher what you're saying.

NeuroFizz · Jul 29, 2009

Write words, not sounds (there are some exceptions). There are plenty of ways to get dialect across to a reader without going into phonetic spelling, which gets tediuous very fast and can slow a story to a crawl in sections of dialogue.

Style-shifting? Dialects? People Saying Stuff?

Kitty Pryde

i luv you giant bear statue

efkelley

ow

Kitty Pryde

i luv you giant bear statue

dawinsor

Dorothy A. Winsor

NeuroFizz

The grad students did it