JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #25
November 5, 2020
This week I want to talk about dialect. When we write dialogue, sometimes we want to help portray a character by their dialect, especially if it departs from what we consider to be the norm. However, representing dialect in writing can be tricky. Some writers invent quasi-phonetic spellings to indicate an accent, but too much of this kind of thing can make reading the dialogue a tedious slog.
Consider the word "victuals." Despite its spelling, this word is pronounced "vittles" by everyone who uses it in natural speech, but sometimes a writer will write "vittles" instead of "victuals" to emphasize the pronunciation and hence the accent. The same can be said of "going to": millions of people pronounce "going to" in the modal usage (e.g. "we’re going to eat breakfast") as "gonna," and writers will sometimes spell it as "gonna" to emphasize the accent. I don’t think this is necessary, and too much of it can be confusing. Readers will stumble through awkward spellings trying to guess what kind of phonetic structure the writer is trying to indicate--unless the writer and the reader and both proficient with the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). Consider how we’d have to spell "insurance" or "July" if we wanted to indicate their pronunciation in a southern-US accent--the distinctions are not merely phonetic. If we can indicate an accent by some other means, then a reader can reflexively "hear" words as if they’re spoken in that accent no matter how they’re spelled, as in "victuals" or "going to."
I think the clearest indicators of accent and hence dialect are phrase structures and word choices. A character who uses the word "cart" might have a different accent than one who says "buggy." Characters who say "berm" speak differently than those who say "bank." Does the character say "coke," "soda," or "pop"? Or "y’all" versus "yous" or "yous guys" or just "you" or "ye." Likewise, grammatical oddities can help indicate an accent: when a character says "What you doing?" it’s likely we don’t hear the ‘g’ even if the writer doesn’t leave it off. Or consider a character saying "I ain’t coming back no more": how much of the pronunciation is suggested by the grammar?
Good dialogue comes from a keen ear and careful study of the way people talk to one another. In ordinary conversation we unconsciously interpret people, making assumptions about their intentions and attention, and we don’t always hear exactly what they say. To be good at dialogue, you have to be good at listening to people. And quite a lot of what you want to express about a character’s dialect can be merely suggested in dialogue rather than spelled out in awkward pseudo-phonetic spelling.
Then again, there are novels like Riddley Walker.