Writing and Language, Dialect, Accent and Register

From time to time, writers need to depict a character who speaks with an accent, in a dialect, or even in a foreign language. And quite often, we will have a group of characters who are involved in, let’s say, magic. The area of interest, be it magic or anything else, will require its own register, of which more later.

Idiosyncratic speech can make writing tricky. But before we consider how best to handle the situation, let’s take a closer look at just what these terms mean.

A language is a communication system shared by a number of people. English is today an international language, not limited by national borders. Esperanto is an invented language, intended to provide a relatively simple means of communication among people who have no common language. Auslan is the sign language of the Australian deaf community. Cornish is a dead language that has been revived by a few natives of the county who are eager to give the ancient tongue a new lease of life.

Most languages contain more than one dialect. A dialect is a variety of language used by a specific speech community. A dialect may have noticeable differences in grammar, syntax and vocabulary from the ‘standard’ form of the language. ‘Dialect’ implies that it is spoken by many or most people who live in a particular area, so we talk, for instance of someone speaking in a Yorkshire dialect. But Black American English is definitely a dialect, and it is not limited to any particular area. Cultural factors can also come into play.

There’s a difference between a dialect and an accent. The term 'accent' usually refers to the way people pronounce words in a particular area. For example, most English people pronounce the name of the fodder crop lucerne with the accent on the second syllable, while their Australian cousins put the accent on the first syllable. Both Brits and Australians pronounce ‘buoy’ the same way as ‘boy’, while their Stateside buddies will say ‘booi’. However, Brits, Aussies and Americans (and Kiwis, South Africans Canadians and Indians, among others!) who speak a reasonably standard form of their country’s version of English can generally understand each other without too many hitches, so they are said to be speaking ‘with an accent' rather than ‘in a dialect’.

But try putting a country Cornishman, a country Queenslander and a native of the Deep South in a room together. You would probably get a few laughs from their mutual incomprehension because it’s quite likely their accents would be so broad, and would contain so many mutually unintelligible words, that they could be said to be using dialect rather than accent. This is less true today, of course, than it was even 30 years ago, but even so, anyone who travels around the different English speaking countries will tell a story or two about failures of communication.

So what about our last term, register? A register is a variety of language associated with people's occupations and interests. 'Register' describes variations in language use connected with a particular topic. For instance, if I go to a writers meeting, I will hear expressions such as ‘protag’, ‘POV’, ‘sub’, synop’ ‘blurb’ all of which are either limited to people involved in writing and publishing or have a different meaning in the literary context than they do in everyday speech. But I might go straight from the writers meeting to review a ballet, and my review is likely to contain words such as pirouette, pas de deux, balon, elevation, flic-flac and entrechat, all of which are French in origin because France is where ballet was first codified, so it based its vocabulary on that language.

All of us have more than one register, which we will use in appropriate contexts. It’s useless for me to natter on about POV or balon at a get-together for people who practise Yoga, for example. I might find one or two folk there who knew what I was talking about, but generally, it would be inappropriate. We all know intuitively to restrict register use to its proper context.

So how would we deal with these situations if they form part of a story we want to set down on paper? I’ll start investigating that in my next post.

(You'll find the follow-up to this article at:
http://egoboo-wa.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/writing-in-dialect-accent-or-register.html)

What's Happening to Publishing?

This week I heard about a successful writer who has not been able to sell her latest trilogy based on a proposal although she has been trying for nearly a year. She's gone ahead with writing it but has no idea whether it will ever sell. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a beginner but to hear it about an established author was, to put it mildly, unnerving. Even more disturbing, as I discovered in trawling the net, it appears she's by no means the only one in this situation.

There's more happening out there in the publishing world. On her blog, Pub Rants, Agent Kristin has something to say about Random House's recent decision to change the way it calculates royalties.

Then, as so often happens, I came across this on Nicola Morgan's blog, Help! I Need a Publisher linking to a post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Both are blogs I look at frequently because they are full of practical good sense for surviving in the writing world. It seems there's a lot to worry about if you want to be a writer these days but while Kristine Kathryn Rusch tells us quite bluntly about all the problems she also offers some good advice about how to survive this period of turmoil.

Have a look at what they have to say but try not to fall into despair. I don't know why others choose to write but I started because I had stories to tell and share and that will not change. Yes, the writing world is in a state of upheaval but the truth is we don't know what will emerge out of the present situation. All we can do is keep our heads down and have faith that story telling will survive. It will because it always has. It may have a different form but human beings have an insatiable thirst for stories and it will need to be satisfied. At the same time we need to keep up with what is going on in the industry and adapt to those changes. Hard? Maybe but writers are imaginative and creative. We can do that.

It's going to be a bumpy road but I'll see you at the other end.

Edit: apparently the page isn't showing from the link to Pub Rants. I'm not sure why. Here's an alternative option. This link takes you to the blog. If you go to her post of June 29 and scroll down past the details about Courtney Milan's Unlocked, which she is justifiably excited about, you will find the part on Random House. The previous post about Harlequin is also interesting.