Need Assistance From Someone Who Is Native to Ireland

Northern or Southern Ireland? Is this modern day, or historical?

Angela said:

And yes, I did use some phonetic rendering when creating the dialogue.

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You rendered Irish phonetically?

I'd pay just to see that.

Hmm, of course accents sound different from county to county as well. If you want to portray a Wicklow accent (IIRC), you turn all 'th' into 't'. Wexford speakers use 'em' a lot where we'd say 'uh' or 'um'.

I think that dropping the 't' sounds entirely would give more of a Scottish sound.

Angela said:

Nope, not Irish rendered phonetically. Some of the characters are Irish, speaking English. In order to convey the Irish accent of the characters,

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[insert dialogue], he said in heavily accented English. <-- that's really all you need. Many readers find "accented" dialogue off-putting.

Also, if you're talking any BC dialect, the "English" is going to sound like a foreign language. Most modern readers can't suss out Chaucer, which was more Middle English. Forget trying to understand something from further back. I'm not even sure English was a language in any of its known forms in the BC period. You're talking iron age dates when you go that far back. England wasn't even a country at that point.

Hi Angela,
I'm Irish (although living in Australia these days!). I'd be happy to help, but at first glance I would say you may be right that it will sound too Scottish. 'Didna' and 'Isna' sound like some Scottish accents but don't sound Irish to me. I'm not sure how much help I'll be really, if you're setting your work in ancient times. What makes writing sound authentically Irish to me is the use of idiom and phraseology (e.g. Roddy Doyle's writing) rather than phonetically rendered speech, and of course modern idiom etc won't work for you. But, any, happy to give it a go and review for you if you like : )

Maggie

'Didna' and 'isna' are 100% Scottish, not Irish.

I'm with MaggieMc - phonetically rendered speech almost never works for me, either. You have a really high chance of making Irish readers, or readers who have any experience of actual Irish people, cringe mightily. What works is creating a difference in dialect through idiom, syntax, phrasing, stuff like that.

You also need to pick a region of Ireland. I know the regions weren't separated in the same way back in the time you're writing about, but you're taking liberties by necessity anyway, with the scenes being in English. You do need to root your characters' speech in a specific dialect. The accents, idioms, phrasing, etc of Dublin are very different from those of Kerry, and both are very different from those of Donegal or Galway or Belfast; if you don't pick one, it'll just turn into a jumble with no coherence.

I'm assuming you're American - what if you read a line of dialogue, supposedly from an American character, that went, 'Howdy, youse guys. It's gon' be, like, totes hot as shizzle today. You betcha'? Every bit of that line is plausibly American on its own, but as a whole it's ridiculous. That's what you risk sounding like if you try to sound Irish without picking a region. There is such a thing as generic Irish, obviously, just like there's such a thing as generic American - but it doesn't sound distinctive enough for your purposes, so you'll have to lean in a bit on the dialect, and for that to work you need a region.

I think what you might need most is to get some Irish dialect into your ear. From the isna/didna thing, it sounds like you've got little or no experience of Irish speech - and that's going to get in your way. If you decide to use Wicklow as your source dialect, for example, find some episodes of a Wicklow-set soap opera called Glenroe. A few of those should give you a sense of the rhythms and idioms you're working with.

Angela said:

While the story is set in modern day U.S., the Irish characters are from ancient Ireland, before there really was a division between Northern and Southern Ireland.

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This actually makes it more complicated with regards to language and dialect - early Ireland was comprised of lots of small, quite insular kingdoms and people tended not to travel far, so a lot of language stayed very 'local' - this can still be seen clearly. for instance, where I live you can tell exactly where someone lives based on their accent - right down to the village they are from or the side of town.

The Irish characters are the ancestors of my protagonist and antagonist. They are primarily from two different time periods, and their specific eras aren't stated. One set would be from the late BC era, with a couple of those characters being removed from each other by a couple of generations. The other group would likely be from the early AD era.

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How are you dealing with language? Your characters at this time most certainly would not speak English. In fact, they wouldn't even be speaking anything we could clearly identify as irish - at this time the language would be very primitive irish - Goidelic.

I know I'm taking historical liberties by having these characters speak English, and in one scene, my antagonist realizes that neither she nor the other character she's talking to are speaking English, but English is what her mind is translating the dialogue into. And yes, I did use some phonetic rendering when creating the dialogue.

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Don't do this. Please. As an Irish person with a strong accent I want to kick puppies when writers do this. See, the thing about Irish people and Irish accents - we think we sound like everyone else.
Does that help answer your question? If not, please let me know. Again, any help anyone can give would be greatly appreciated!

I also just realized there are nine sections, with an approximate word count of 9,300. Two of those are longer sections because they have a good bit of narration breaking up the dialogue.[/QUOTE]

I think asking modern Irish speakers to look at it might not be that much help - Gaelic has moved on a lot, and has also been mostly replaced by English which changes the accent again.

I'm from the North, so not much help but didna definitely sounds more Northern Irish that Southern. If at all possible, I'd avoid doing anything much with the dialogue that saying it's foreign etc, especially if it's being translated into English for the book anyway.