Dialect Coach

Exercise Your InkTank


“Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f'them?”
- George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

“I ‘uz mos’ to de foot er de islan’ b’fo’ I foun’ a good place.”
- Mark Twain’s Huck Finn

Let’s be frank: Eye dialect (which pretends to represent nonstandard speech by variant or phonetic spelling) is problematic. For one thing, it’s really distracting. It diverts attention away from what was said and places the focus on how it was said. At its best, it’s a shade gratuitous, if not a little insulting. At its worst, it’s racist, classist, and condescending; it implies an ignorance on the part of the speaker, or a lack of education, or both, whether it means to or not. Consider the examples above: Shaw attempts to represent the speech of a poor street woman and Twain attempts to represent the speech of a slave. Notice anything problematic about this scenario? Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style recommends that you use eye dialect with caution—“Do not use dialect unless you are a devoted student of the tongue you hope to reproduce”—for the obvious reasons.

We’ve talked before about how to signal dialects that are essential to the story without reproducing the peculiarities of expression: It’s often enough just to describe how a speaker speaks in order to imbue the character’s language with a dialect a reader will “hear.” Beyond that, you can evoke dialect through sentence structure—cadences of speech. Let’s see how this works: Imagine a scenario in which a father walks in on his teenaged son and a young girl in the garage.

Begin here with a cadence that might work to signal a dialect:
He buttoned his jacket up to his neck and kicked a flap of mud from his shoe. “I don’t care what the hell you two do, just as long as you’re not doing it here,” he said.

And now add information about the way the speaker speaks:
He buttoned his jacket up to his neck and kicked a flap of mud from his shoe. “I don’t care what the hell you two do,” he said, his low hollow drawl burning. “Just as long as you’re not doing it here.”

Where would you place this character in the world? What kind of guy is he?

Y’all Hear Now?
Begin with the same scenario and establish a different dialect through your word choice and your arrangement of words.