The scenario is a confrontation between two "modern" people as of the times of the book (though it's set technologically in the 1700s), and one wizard who has been imprisoned in a sort of limbo for five hundred years. He does speak the language (called Feccish in the story), but he speaks it as people did five hundred years before the events of the book.

I've read my fair share of Shakespeare; I've just never tried to write dialog for someone who actually speaks that way. Any takers?

"Thou seest me."

"I seeth thee."

Not as certain about the verb declension, but I think it's different depending on whether it's first, second, or third person.

wetwilly, care to enlighten us?

There's a very good article on Wikipedia on Early Modern English, which I recommend you look into. If you are writing English dialog for the 1500s, you're going to have to master the various verb conjugations that differ from English:

I read/we read/you read/you all read/he reads/they read.
I read/we read/thou readest/ye readeth/he readeth/they readeth

And of course there are different verb endings and irregular verbs to deal with.

Your best sources for Early Modern English style would be Shakespeare and the King James Bible. That's tough enough for most casual readers. If you are going before 1470 or so you're into Middle English which is difficult even for an educated English reader with plenty of Shakespeare and KJV Bible under his belt.Prior to the Norman conquest in 1066 you're into Old English, which is as incomprehensible to modern English readers as modern Dutch or Frisian would be.

Tolkien is worth study too. He consciously used archaism in his writing as *characterization*. All his characters speak different periods of modern English. The Hobbits speak modern 19th C. English; elves like Elrond speak 18th C. English. The Rohirrim are perhaps late 17th C. English in style. The corrupted wizard Saruman speaks uncannily like an ultra-modern 20th C. politician.

A good example is in the handling of the "r" sound. Asian characters are often shown using the "l" sound for "r", mispronouncing "pray" as "play" for example. A native speaker of Cantonese or Mandarin would have no problem saying "pray"; the "r" and "l" sounds both occur in all Chinese dialects, but "r" never at the start of a word and "l" never at the end. Thus a Chinese character with poor English skills would have no problem saying "ladder", but would find "radial" a mouthful, just as we have difficulty with foreign words that start with "ng". We have that sound in English, but never at the start of words.

Japanese speakers have a different problem with English in that their "r" sound is pronounced with the tongue in a different position. The unfamiliar consonant may sound like an "l" twisted into an "r" to an English speaker.

If you can't be bothered to get the speech patterns right, it'd be better to avoid the issue altogether and have the character speak excellent standard English.

Still, dialect while hard and potentially insulting can be fun and useful; you just have to do your homework rather than parroting other writers who don't know what they're talking about and may well be bigots.

I have one character who speaks an over-the-top South Midlands dialect that is roughly based on Will Rogers but is also a deliberate satire of dime-novel cowboy-speak. In truth there was no universal "cowboy" accent in the 19th C. because cowboys came from all over the place. Cowboy "slang" is liberally salted with nautical references, because the same kind of man who went to sea often found driving cattle an attractive calling. Just like you'd have New England Quakers, Africans, Cape Verdeans and Portuguese sailors before the mast, you got all kinds on the trail.

What the dime novel writers conceived of as THE "cowboy accent" was an inland Southern dialect carried by emigrants from the Ohio River valley westward across Oklahoma and Northern Texas. It was easy for me to do that dialect because it *is* an iconic one in popular culture. I knew I got it right when one reader objected that this character spoke exactly the way the ignorant hillbilly kids in his high school used to speak. That high school was right in the historical heartland of the dialect, and I was evoking a time before mass media had made suppression of regional quirks a sign of intelligence, or assimilation a sign of sophistication.

So I have consciously chosen to use dialect in a way that's not strictly justifiable from a linguistic standpoint, but in a way that's obviously satirical and over-the-top. The exact geography of the character's origin is never specified; she comes from the West of the Cowboy Myth.

I did want to be consistent, though, and translate the one characters ancient dialogue well. I'm going to have the accent gradually disappear over the course of the story, and indeed as the villain he doesn't appear in every scene, so I don't have masses of text with which to be careful. I haven't done as well-researched dialect creation as you mention, but I have done some quasi-dialect writing in the past (posted long ago), with regards to people speaking a foreign language without resorting to writing the accent. I'll be careful.

Thanks for all the examples though, it is fun to read and good to keep in mind.

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Your best sources for Early Modern English style would be Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

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