Dialogue & Accents

Welcome Dante-x!!

I've been thinking about the same thing for my WIP, and I'm not sure how to give them accents and still make it easy to read and not laughable.

I just finished reading Huck Finn, and that's a perfect example of accents (well, dialects, really, but close enough). Though I laughed at it when I first started reading it, the dialects grew on me after a while. It made the story and characters seem more real. So I think if you do the accent realistically, the readers will be fine with it. Huck Finn was a comedy though, so maybe the dialects made it more humorous...? I don't know. But I think it might be okay. I'm not really sure how to write a French accent, though, so I can't help with that.

Sorry I couldn't help more!

Even though Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) got away with some pretty extreme phonetic accent-rendering, I wouldn't recommend doing much of it. When Twain did it in Huck Finn, it was revolutionary, plus he was a genius. If you want a much worse example of similar vintage, check out Melville's Confidence-Man. Most modern editors hate such phoneticization. You get a lot more mileage with simple word choice, reflecting character speech patterns. See Eudora Welty for some good rendering of Southern speech patterns, for instance.

In terms of word choice for someone for whom English is not the first language, a common error made (likewise in reverse for English-speakers using another language) is word-for-word translating. German and French have considerably different sentence structures, for example. Russian does not use articles. Start with a word-for-word translation from, say, French into English, and see what it looks/feels/sounds like. Maybe even throw in the occasional hesitant, "How you say?", e.g., "The . . . le chien . . . how you say? . . . dog?" The reader can fill in the sound of that being spoken without the writer needing to render some phonetic approximation of it.

caw.

Check out the Dialog in Children's book thread in the children's writing forum. it has some suggestions on how to handle this.

I think it would also be a good idea to keep your intended audience in mind. There are those who enjoy reading foreign terms and then finding out what they mean in the text. But then there are a lot of people who don't.


I love reading Poe, but always get tripped up when he throws an italicized French sentence in and I have no idea what it means.

I have a French character in my WIP. I rarely indicate an accent other than the odd apostrophised "h" at the beginning of a word. Generally I try to use foreign structure and word order to indicate his original tongue, and leave the reader to superimpose the accent. He uses some colloquial terms and contractions, but other times will speak things in a very orderly way. I also drop in French words here and there - not because he doesn't know the word in english, but for effect - like a swear word or an order (the imperative forms of common french verbs)