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Chapter 6: Developing Your Dialogue-Writing Skills
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or to convey an Australian accident, you can write ‘Austrahlian’. Similarly,
Germans notoriously tend to use ‘v’ instead of ‘w’, and ‘z’ instead of ‘th’, and
Japanese people have trouble with ‘l’ and tend to say ‘r’ instead.
One problem with this approach is that the text can quickly become hard to
read and understand. Readers spend a great deal of effort trying to work out
what on earth the character is saying and have difficulty hearing how the
speech is meant to sound (which rather defeats the purpose of using phonetics).
Another problem is that it can all too easily look as if you’re making
fun of the character, and can even seem stereotypical, one-dimensional and
racist!
A more subtle approach is to select a few words in a sentence and make clear
how the character pronounces them. This technique acts to remind readers
that the character has an accent, without making the rest of the speech
unintelligible.
You can start using heavier phonetics and then lighten up once the reader
has ‘got’ the voice in his head, just reminding him now and again.
Getting accents accurate
A difficulty with accents is that you need to know a little bit about the native
language of the character whose dialogue you’re writing in order to be able to
convey accurately how that person speaks. You need to know not only how
the character pronounces words, but also the kind of mistakes in grammar or
sentence construction that he’s likely to make. These aspects depend on the
grammatical structure of the character’s native language and the sounds that
are used.
You can’t be an expert in a wide range of languages – in fact you may not be
an expert in any! If you do need to write about characters from different countries
and cultures, the best thing to do is to get some help from people who
know the language and culture inside out. Listen to the way that they speak,
meet their friends and jot down words and phrases that they use. Don’t be
afraid to ask someone to help you, to make sure that you have it right.
People who aren’t fluent in a language are often overly formal and avoid contractions,
saying, for example, ‘will not’ for ‘won’t’, ‘is not’ for ‘isn’t’ and ‘I am’
for ‘I’m’. Knowing this tendency can help you to convey a foreign accent better
than anything.
Another useful approach is to use the fact that non-native speakers often
make mistakes with common idioms. These may be subtle – ‘let’s play it by
the ear’ – or literal translations of comparable idioms from their own language;
for example, the French for ‘as easy as falling off a log’ is ‘as easy as