A (Good?) Example From the Master
What’s the big deal about using dialect in fiction? Let’s look at an example from the all-time master of dialect, Mark Twain:
“Say, Jim, I’ll fetch the water if you’ll whitewash some.”
Jim shook his head and said, “Can’t, Mars Tom. Ole missis, she tole me I got to go an’ git dis water an’ not stop foolin’ roun’ wid anybody. She say she spec’ Mars Tom gwine to ax me to whitewash, an’ so she tole me go ’long an’ ’tend to my own business—she ’lowed she’d ’tend to de whitewashin’.”
“Oh, never you mind what she said, Jim. That’s the way she always talks. Gimme the bucket—I won’t be gone only a minute. She won’t ever know.”
“Oh, I dasn’t, Mars Tom. Ole missis she’d take an’ tar de head off’n me. ’Deed she would.”
—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
At the time (1876) many readers were familiar with the two related dialects spoken by Tom and Jim and appreciated the faithfulness of Twain’s rendition. If you’d grown up in the same town, you’d have talked like one of them yourself.
It sounds overwrought to the modern American ear, though, and some of it doesn’t connect with our experience. For example, I look at “gwine,” wonder how I’m really supposed to hear it, give up, and change it in my mind’s ear to “gonna.”
All those misspellings and contractions make Jim’s effortless speech difficult to read, giving it an inappropriate heaviness. Again, readers in the 1870s were used to reading dialect and didn’t have this problem. But we’re not them.
And I can’t shake the conclusions that many words that Tom and Huck would pronounce identically, like dropping the “g” on “fooling,” are shown differently depending on who’s saying it, making Tom more correct and Jim more colloquial than they really are. In short, even the experts are exaggerating the differences between groups. Not fair!
A Moron With a Speech Impediment?
You can assume that a modern American reader will react to similar dialect as follows:
- First, They’ll find heavy dialect difficult and unpleasant to read. They’ll get used to it after a while, but the dialog loses some of its punch until then.
- Second, such characters will come across to them as morons, and maybe morons with a speech impediment.
- Third, they may conclude that the author is prejudiced against such characters.
American readers have been sensitive to such things since the Civil Rights era. The old-style use of dialect fell out of fashion as more people became suspicious of it. So we indicate dialect differently these days. More on that later.
I’ve noticed that British readers don’t have such strong reactions. For example, they see Hagrid as less of a deliberately over-the-top caricature of a rustic idiot than Americans tend to.
Using Dialect Effectively
Less is more. Use real words. Rely on word choice rather than misspellings.
For example, a cartoon Italian might greet someone with, “Hey! How’s a things going with you?” (Using a slight clumsiness compared to the colloquial “Hey, how’s it going?” and using “How’s a things” instead of “How are things.”)
Yakov Smirnoff was famous for jokes like, “In Soviet Russia, TV watches you!” (Not “In Soviet Russia, the TV watches you!” because Russians and Ukrainians have trouble remembering to use articles.)
That’s about it. You pick a few dialect or second-language quirks and let it go at that. Use more for, say, a cartoon character and fewer for a realistic one.