Before Writing Dialect, Earn Your Uffda, Eh?

Remember the first time you read Huckleberry Finn? High school English class? Your excited teacher nearly wet herself writing the title on the chalkboard. 

The story, she said, is about a boy running away from his foster home and taking on the whole adult culture. You were fifteen. It was the 60s...Okay. That was just me. Sorry.

Anyway, your adolescent rebellious nature salivated at the idea. Mrs. P had you hooked with her opening lecture.

Then you opened the book.

It ... wasn't what you expected. It was all right. In fact, everything was fine until Huck found Jim hiding on an island. At first, your young mind glommed onto the conflict. Will Huck help the  escaped slave or not? Will he bow to the slave-state values with which he lives? Will his innate humanness overpower the river morality? That part was easy to engage.

And then Jim spoke.

I don't know about your class, but those of us in our rural, northern Minnesota classroom had no idea what he was saying. We were pretty sure it wasn’t English. Our engagement level with “The Great American Masterpiece” dropped to zero.

Mrs. P frantically explained that, indeed, Jim did speak English, that Twain simply wrote the words as Jim would have said them. "He was employing literary dialect,”she said. One classmate innocently opined, “Yeah, well, that may be so, but it ain’t good English.”

We unceremoniously spit out the hook. Few of us actually finished the book, just reading enough to pass the test. Nor did we care to. If we couldn’t understand it, we figured, there was no sense reading it.

It wasn’t until years later that a lucky few of us learned the important technique of reading dialect as it is pronounced, not as it is spelled. We learned not only to see the words on a page, but also to hear them in our heads. That was a great discovery. Huck Finn made sense! It WAS a masterpiece! Mrs. P was correct!

Unfortunately, not everybody learns that technique. Too often people see dialect and/or foreign words in a story and turn off the internal translator. They close the book and hide it under the stack beside their bedside table, never to be seen again ... until a neat-freak spouse commands, "Either read it or dump it."

As a writer, then, it is important to consider the danger of using dialect before writing conversation. It is also important to ignore the admonition of lazy readers to never employ literary dialect.

To evaluate whether to use dialect or not, consider these advantages:

1. Used correctly, dialect establishes time, place, and character background without tedious description which interrupts the flow of the plot and bores the boogers out of the reader.
2. Effective dialect gives characters depth, dimension, and life.
3. Rather than creating a flat background, dialect adds to the realism of a scene, story, or novel.

If your use of dialect doesn’t do any of those, fix it or dump it. Why? Because poor use of dialect has the following disadvantages:

1. It destroys authenticity. The words are just there and become rather annoying. Annoyed readers are unhappy readers.
2. Bad dialect diminishes your characters from people into mere stereotypes.
3. The worse your portrayal, the greater chance of distracting your audience from your story and its theme. You had a purpose when you started writing. Make sure your audience is still around at the end to understand it.

So how does one write effective dialect? Consider the following:

1. If you have no experience with a particular dialect, avoid imposing it on your story. It is important to realize there is more to writing dialect than simply spelling words as they are pronounced. There is a rhythm and phraseology that is also unique to the way people speak. Unless you have been immersed in a particular dialect, it is difficult to recreate it on the page.
2. Although each dialect has its own cliches and idiosyncrasies which demand to be used, avoid trivializing them by overusing trite conventions. For example, dropping hard h sounds and changing all long a sounds to long i's will not make your dialogue more Cockney. Sprinkling your conversations with an excess of ehs does not make them more Canadian. Yes, both dialects have those respective traits, but their overuse creates more  of a caricature than an accurate portrayal.
3. Whatever you do, be real. 

When the Coen brothers filmed Fargo, they used the Minnesota dialect more effectively than I had ever seen. Some audiences heard it and laughed. Others heard it and doubted. Those who speak it as part of their normal existence disputed it. 

Despite their protestation, I can assure you it was real ... at least for a segment of our population. 

When I left the theater in my small lutefisk ghetto town, two locals ahead of me discussed the merits of the film. One asked, “Vell, whadidja t’ink den?” 

His friend answered, “It vass pritty good, but we don’ talk like dat dere den.”

I wanted to say, “Oh, yah, you deeooo.”  However, valuing my years of orthodontia work, I resisted the temptation. One can take this whole realism thing too far.

The point is this: Dialect well-used enhances a story. Do not simply recreate the sounds; recreate the culture in which the story resides. Use it to endear the characters to the reader. Use it to make your work memorable. Use it to sells the story.

The key to all three is to make your dialogue real.

If you can’t, uffda! Don’t use it den.