stuff like interview with Jamaican track star Asafa Powell and Interview with Gisela Zebroski, author of The Baroness
etc... etc...
or random videos of just kids playing around in london, or india
The common features for English as second language speakers are absent or misplaced articles, prepositions, and conjunctions; number, gender, tense, case, and station, and syntax and diction confusion; flawed interpretation of the nuances of words with multiple definitions, double and more negatives, and imperfect idiom usage or native idioms that don't translate into English very well.
Other less common areas range in frequent discourse markers used for thought-gathering processes, frequent repetition of definitive clauses, and broken or tentative speaking rhythms.
The rarer features I've encountered are erudite speech that's off kilter and sometimes peculiarly precise but seems like gibberish on the surface and the ready usage of foreign words that are part of American English yet used in different contexts in their native language.
I've encounterd dock workers, railroad workers, and shipyard workers, who generally have similar speaking dialects, yet their diction is precise in usage of abbreviated phrases related to the vernaculars of their profession.
Aristotle had a rhetorical excercise where a composition was translated into another language then translated back to the original. The native Spanish-speaking characters speaking English in the Old Western movies spoke like that was where their dialogue lines came from.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited August 07, 2008).]
People deride the way Lovecraft presented "dialects" in his work...but truthfully, how many ways are there to do it?
[This message has been edited by halogen (edited August 07, 2008).]
In a short story, I typically cheat by having one main character speak with lots of contractions, and the other main character speak with fewer. It's a quick fix--maybe not the best one--but it does help keep two characters from sounding alike.
Strunk & White, Roorbach, several other writing guides all say a little dialect goes a long way. Though I've read stories that either all the dialogue or the narrative are entirely in dialect. I've not encountered any stories where dialect is in both.
One guideline for written representation of dialect recommends replacing missing letters (unpronounced) with an apostrophe, 'em for them. Though more than one apostrophe is generally confusing. Contractions with missing letters are a bit awkward.
A Southren dialect example mixing grammatical vice with apostrophes and regional dialect.
"I din't say airy 'at. I say he din't keep me like he used of no more."
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited August 08, 2008).]
She also will huff a lot when adults may not understand what she's talking about. I've discovered that gestures can help immensely when fleshing out a character as long as they're not over used. Otherwise this child would be huffing like a steam engine through the entire story.
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So what does "far away" mean? A particular accent? What time frame?
The whole story is actually set in fantasy equivilent of modern times, and the girl has always spoken the same language as everyone else, she's just lived a different lifestyle. I don't know what accent I'm looking for, although I've been given a lot to think about just now. Thanks for the great ideas everyone. I definately want to keep it simple.
Perhaps a Maine fisherman accent...Do you think you could help me with that IB?
She says that if you have a character who uses mostly "Latinate" words (which usually have more than one syllable), your character comes off as arrogant, or at least more intelligent. If you have a character who uses mostly "Anglo-Saxon" words (which are usually words of one syllable), your characters come off as ignorant, or at least more "just folks."
And you can have a spectrum with only words of one syllable are used at one end and the most multi-syllabic words possible are used at the other end, with varying characters all along in between.
So maybe if you think of what you want your girl character to say, and then find a way for her to say it that is closer to the one-syllable words end, while the rest of the people tend to be closer to the multi-syllable end, you'll have enough of a difference to work, but it will also be subtle enough for the readers to sense but not really notice.
Edited to add: I hope that makes sense.
[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited August 08, 2008).]
I think all the "ah"s instead of "r" would get old quickly in a story.
One thing about my husband's distant relatives that actually talk this way is that they have an impressive vocabulary, and dozens of ways to describe the weather "It's been spitting rain all day" and "It's been misting" mean two totally different things (and neither apply to today. It's been pouring buckets today, but if I actually SAID that, I'd get accused of hyperbole. No one wants to admit the weather might actually inconvenience THEM. They're way too tough.--"Nah," they'd say, "This he-ah's just a nice show-ah." And did I mention that they are rugged?)
[This message has been edited by Unwritten (edited August 08, 2008).]
Did anyone besides me have a tough time with The Color Purple dialogue?
Thanks for the compliment debhoag--I don't think I've ever been called delovely before.
I have a hard time with more than the dialogue in The Color Purple. I didn't make it very far into the book before I had to put it down. If I remember right though, she didn't really use an accent at all, it was mostly her choice of words and their arrangement that conveyed the voice. What didn't you like about it?
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So maybe if you think of what you want your girl character to say, and then find a way for her to say it that is closer to the one-syllable words end, while the rest of the people tend to be closer to the multi-syllable end, you'll have enough of a difference to work, but it will also be subtle enough for the readers to sense but not really notice.
Would this make her seem less intelligent than the other characters? She IS less educated, but certainly not less intelligent. I guess it wouldn't have to do that. I'm going to give it a try and let you know how it goes.
In terms of intelligence, if she can make sense of complicated things, I think that would show even with monosyllabic dialogue. While an expansive vocabulary is indicative of a good education, that doesn't mean it has anything to do with smarts.
Heck, some people think spelling is an indication of intelligence, but I know some really smart people who just can't spell worth a darn. I suspect it's more a matter of how they process (visual processors tend to be better spellers, but with English, aural processors have a much harder time).