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I'm struggling right now with finding a smooth way to portray differences in dialect. It's important in the story only to give each character a unique 'voice' and to highlight the fact that there are regional differences. It's not a critical nuance, but one I think would enhance the overall tale, which is set in an alternate fantasy world (medieval feel).
Obvious dialect can be tiresome on the reader. What I'm looking for is something subtle. Word choice and sentence structure is how I'd like to portray dialect, not contractions like y'all, etc. I also don't want it to sound like any earthly brogue.
I can think of three instances where dialect was really well done. 1) Tad Williams, the "Dragonbone Chair" 2) Katherine Kerr's Deverry series, beginning with "Daggerspell." 3) The tv series Firefly.
I'm just wondering if anyone else has struggled with this problem and might have some advice for me, beyond ripping off what's been done well by other writers.
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Rita Mae Brown, in her book, STARTING FROM SCRATCH, recommends using words of one syllable (mostly Anglo-Saxon-ish contributions to the English language) to make a character seem either "down home/just folks" or ignorant/stupid, and to use multiple syllable words (mostly Latinate contributions to the English language) to make a character seem either well-educated or arrogant/snobby.
You could do that for a couple of your characters, at least.
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You don't have to use a dialect all the way through, either. use it at first to establish the character in your readre's mind, then back off a bit. this applies mostly to dialogue-heavy writing, of course. if your MC has no more than a few "A beer it is time for." lines, then don't bother.
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I love Rita Mae Brown's writing. I'll have to find a copy of that book. Thanks for the reference!
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One would assume that more is needed to differentiate between, say, the simple and the stupid, than simply putting short and stubby Anglo-Saxon words in a character's mouth.
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Yeah, but as you stray away from basics of word choice, you're straying away from the question of using dialect.
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Avoid funny spellings. They throw people and are hard to hear. Use slang instead (there's a big difference between someone who thinks a party is interesting and one who thinks it's wicked keen) or familiar words in unfamiliar places.
Play with tenses. One of the big things someone who speaks a language poorly will get wrong is verb tenses. In my just-finished novel I had a dialect where the speakers used only present tense, and you'd be amazed how much it changed the language while still getting the point of the sentence across. (They also had severe problems with subject-verb agreement, routinely using "I gets" rather than "I get", for example.)
Play with articles. Another thing dialect speakers will often change is what they use "a" or "the" in front of. They may also assign genders to things we don't. These are both particularly true of non-native speakers. "The tree, she is damaged" or "I have not the understanding" both give a nice exotic flavor to dialogue.
Play with word order, sentence structure, and negatives. "He don't want no coffee" is a perfectly legitimate way to speak where I come from, but say it anywhere else and they'll think you're stupid. "No coffee he does want" is roughly how the sentence would be structured in Latin (nouns are always piled in front, verbs always come last.)
Finally, whatever you do, do it *consistantly*. Don't obscure the meaning by paying too much attention to dialect (You can get away with this once or twice by having another character say "What?", but it's a trick. Don't overuse it.) Don't change one thing and expect it to be enough, or you end up with the one-trick-pony "Yoda" effect. Read whatever you do aloud. It may scan on the page, but if you can't say it, neither can they.
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I'd agree that one should stay away from misspellings. Probably the worst example I can think of language butchery is David Drake's (Old Nathan) story Bullhead in Bill Fawcett's Cats in Space anthology. This reduces a pretty charming little story to unreadability.
One important thing to remember about dielects is they have internal consistancy. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a good example of what happens when an author creates a dialect then forgets about it half way through his story.
quote:Obvious dialect can be tiresome on the reader.
This is taken as a given, but I don't know that it has to be. I think that if dialect is used in place of other characterization, that is not good. But I can't help thinking of Lady Chatterly's Lover where the Lover could speak "normal" if the situation warranted, but speaking in dialect was his way of letting his hair down, and resulted in a very intimate feel.
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