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A difficulty with dialect- article

edited October 2014 in - Reading
Interesting piece by the author of 'The Herring Girl'.

"Authors have always come under pressure to tone down regional and historical accents. It's a case of do 'dialect lite', or be damned."

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/03/a-difficulty-with-dialect

Comments

  • Good article. I think dialect can alienate some readers. I think ESL (English as a Second Language) readers especially. Depends how heavy it is, too.

    But I did try to use a Southern African-American Vernacular in my flash story "Apart at the Seams" over at CafeLit. I'm not against dialect. But it's always worth bearing in mind if you're writing a novel and want to reach a wide audience. It does seem a shame, on the other hand, if you can't convey the linguistic aspect of a culture because of editorial restrictions. A piece can lose something, I believe, if it's written without enough traces of dialect.

    I like the idea of "director's cut" novels. It's something I've been expecting to happen for a long time, to be honest, with self-publishing.
  • If readers of Viz can happily tune-in to the dialectic speech bubbles in Sid the Sexist cartoon strips, then I'm sure a good few readers will make the effort if the story is good enough.
  • Unfortunately a good story isn't going to be enough if the reader has so much difficulty reading the dialect that they can't understand what the character is talking about.
  • Unfortunately a good story isn't going to be enough if the reader has so much difficulty reading the dialect that they can't understand what the character is talking about.
    Dracula being a good example. Parts of the Yorkshire dialect make for very difficult reading.

  • At the workshop last night we were discussing dialect, and we generally agreed that listening to the dialect being read makes it easier to understand, but reading it on the page is the difficult and off-putting aspect for the reader.
  • edited October 2014
    As some of you know, I was on Black Country Radio in the summer reading a short story written entirely in dialect. The original version of this, also in broad dialect had, much to my surprise, been previously shortlisted in a WM comp, so it's not totally impossible to get stuff like that read.
    However, I wouldn't try something like that again. Not only do many people find it very difficult to understand but it's a nightmare to write and to edit and there will always be a dialect 'expert' lurking, ready to savage you should you use a dialect word incorrectly.
    A much better way of conveying the 'flavour' of a piece is to study the style and manner of the speech of the area and the way sentences are composed and delivered. Local speech tends to be idiosyncratic, and can usually satisfactorily be portrayed without excessive use of 'strange' words.
  • Agree with you, SM, the way sentences are structured in different parts of the country is often the most useful tool, and combine that with an occasional word here and there, you'll get the effect you want.
  • Some words need little explanation, even out of context; my favourite Cheshire expression, not in regular use these days, is skitterwit.
  • A good narrative should mean the reader doesn't have to unravel the dialect, should it not?

    I mean, if I know a character is Italian then I tend to hear his dialogue with an Italian 'twang'. If a character is suggested to be from somewhere I am unfamiliar with I don't get this of course, but then I'm unlikely to get the dialect either.

    A few sparse words maybe to add flavour, but I don't enjoy a book where I have to google phrases to make sense of them.
  • We now come onto the issue of how the reader hears the characters speaking...

    Can't remember where I saw or heard it, but it was only in the last couple of weeks.

    The image and voice that each individual reader hears the character having is also different.

    Some hear what they think an Italian would sound like (and as the writer we don't know if the reader just has the stereotype Italian accent they might have seen in films or on tv; or whether they know someone who is Italian, so may have some idea of the sound of the language).

    Others apparently hear the character in their own voice. Others hear their favourite actors/actresses saying the words.
  • Interesting that the article doesn't mention the problems dialect poses for translators. I would have thought that might be one reason publishers are (apparently) reluctant to take on a book written in very heavy dialect, as if a book is successful in the UK foreign rights can bring in a significant amount of extra revenue. If a story can be translated (which presumably does away with the phonetics of the dialect) and still be as good, the contribution of the dialect must be relatively minor.

    I'm unconvinced by claims that including more than just a 'flavour' of authentic dialect adds a certain richness to the text. I haven't come across anything where I've found the dialect to be a real barrier, but whenever I read something where the narrative's written in dialect it always seems like a lot of extra effort (on behalf of the writer and the reader), with limited, if any, benefit in return.
  • A couple of my books have characters with local accents. That's not precisely dialect, but Londoners sometimes speak differently.
    "My Mum come round last night" or ""Give us one of them sausages" for example, and Hs are dropped. Deciding when to write that and when not to is also tricky.
  • I've never tried to write dialect per se, but if I set a story in another country (which I often do) then I'll use a few markers or something similar as suggested by Lizy.
    The only exception is a couple of stories I've written with a very obvious American voice - I think they worked, but they were very short.
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