Accents in Dialogue

Azkaellion said:

Sorry. Can’t take anyone who claims they ‘can’t follow’ Irvine Welsh, James Kelman or Roddy Doyle’s dialogue at all seriously. I suspect the real problem lies elsewhere.

Click to expand...

+1

And as for the Brontes, I can confirm that while most people find Joseph of Wuthering Heights unintelligible when we begin the novel, they are able to "understand" him by the end of the unit. In Wuthering Heights, dialect plays a key role in communicating nuances of class and social hierarchy (even among the servants), and this prompts essential discussion. If one considers Emily Bronte's use of dialect in her novel pointless, then one is missing the point. Society has evolved since the 19th century, but taking the time to consider what elements of a lost culture are communicated via Bronte's use of dialect is valuable, and I find it sad that there are people who fail to recognize that there may be more going on with the dialect than things a 2017 reader would recognize from our world.

Trainspotting would be a different text entirely if rendered into standard English. And I don't think I'd care to read a "translation" of TS.

I find that people who "can't follow" Irvine Welsh or Roddy Doyle (or the Bronte's dialect-speakers) are the sort of people who give up after a page or two.

Azkaellion said:

Sorry. Can’t take anyone who claims they ‘can’t follow’ Irvine Welsh, James Kelman or Roddy Doyle’s dialogue at all seriously. I suspect the real problem lies elsewhere.

Click to expand...

I feel the same with Chaucerian English.

Accents have to be balanced with readability.

I find accents really interesting in much older works like the Brontes', because it does give a window into the time period. In modern writing, I find it mostly annoying. But I suppose the literary professors of the future will thank us for writing thick accents for them to analyze.

Accents are like spices: a little bit goes a long way.

I always find it interesting when readers comment on my books and they'll email me a list of "all the 20,000+ misspelled words I found in your book" and will say they had trouble reading the book "because of all though accents/phonetic spellings you added".

Uhm...

the list of misspelled words will be stuff like:

colour vs color
neighbour va neighbor
travelling vs traveling
windea vs window
centre vs center
eejit vs idiot
me vs my
clim vs climb
oot vs out
auld vs old
hae vs have
aboue vs above
did'na vs didn't
svá vs also
njósn vs news
ávalt vs always
dair vs there
wurd vs word
lum vs chimney
bairn vs child
waefooy vs woeful
chookie vs chickem
bahookie vs bum
aye vs yes
wuids vs woods
ance va once
jeekit vs coat
Alba Nuadh vs Nova Scotia
ný-kominn vs newly arrived
weifs vs wife
spelt vs spelled
moose vs mouse
ceevil vs civil
mys vs mice
jeek vs jack
isne vs is not
cud vs could
herest vs heard
brjóta vs broke

All the words in the first side are Scottish English spellings. All the words in the second side are American English spellings.

Those are all actual words, from an actual language, spelt correctly.

I'm not sure where they found any accents in my books, because I don't add accents to them. Likewise, I don't know where they found any phonetic spellings in my books either, because I've not added any.

Interestingly, they completely overlooked the fact that at the start of the book is a notation which states:

"The author of this book is Scottish. The story you are about to read is written in Scottish English and has not been translated into American."



I think the thing that gets me, is the fact that they are reading a book written in a different language and then complain that it's not using words from their own language, and then because they don't realize it's NOT their language to begin with, they accuse it of having accents added to it. LOL!

PinkUnicorn said:

I think the thing that gets me, is the fact that they are reading a book written in a different language and then complain that it's not using words from their own language, and then because they don't realize it's NOT their language to begin with, they accuse it of having accents added to it. LOL!

Click to expand...

You're perhaps being a bit unfair to some of your readers. A lot of the words in your list do not appear in either the Online Scots Dictionary or the Dictionary of the Scots Language, which are my go-to references when I encounter unfamiliar Scots text.

PinkUnicorn said:

bahookie vs bum

Click to expand...

Oooooh this is such a good word! Imma gonna shake me bahookie tonight!

PinkUnicorn said:

I always find it interesting when readers comment on my books and they'll email me a list of "all the 20,000+ misspelled words I found in your book" and will say they had trouble reading the book "because of all though accents/phonetic spellings you added".

Uhm...

the list of misspelled words will be stuff like:

colour vs color
neighbour va neighbor
travelling vs traveling
windea vs window
centre vs center
eejit vs idiot
me vs my
clim vs climb
oot vs out
auld vs old
hae vs have
aboue vs above
did'na vs didn't
svá vs also
njósn vs news
ávalt vs always
dair vs there
wurd vs word
lum vs chimney
bairn vs child
waefooy vs woeful
chookie vs chickem
bahookie vs bum
aye vs yes
wuids vs woods
ance va once
jeekit vs coat
Alba Nuadh vs Nova Scotia
ný-kominn vs newly arrived
weifs vs wife
spelt vs spelled
moose vs mouse
ceevil vs civil
mys vs mice
jeek vs jack
isne vs is not
cud vs could
herest vs heard
brjóta vs broke

All the words in the first side are Scottish English spellings. All the words in the second side are American English spellings.

Those are all actual words, from an actual language, spelt correctly.

I'm not sure where they found any accents in my books, because I don't add accents to them. Likewise, I don't know where they found any phonetic spellings in my books either, because I've not added any.

Interestingly, they completely overlooked the fact that at the start of the book is a notation which states:

"The author of this book is Scottish. The story you are about to read is written in Scottish English and has not been translated into American."



I think the thing that gets me, is the fact that they are reading a book written in a different language and then complain that it's not using words from their own language, and then because they don't realize it's NOT their language to begin with, they accuse it of having accents added to it. LOL!

Click to expand...

The ones I've bolded do look suspiciously Icelandic to me. Are you writing in Shetlandic, or some other very far north Scots?

Some of those are not Scots. They're not even Old Norse; they are Modern Icelandic.