Dialogue and Dialect--Talking Gooder English

I’ve just learned a new word used by Shakespeare probably never by anyone
else. Vastidity. It means bigness. It’s almost as much fun as a word I
heard once heard somewhere and like to use—nakedidity. What is it about
that “idity” ending? Three tiny syllables. It just sounds funny.




I’m rereading Simon Winchester’s fascinating history of the Oxford English
Dictionary,
The Meaning of Everything (Oxford University Press, 2004), and getting
my knowledge of the history of our language refreshed.

Language is a major part of our lives. It’s how we communicate. (
Duh.) Even if we’re sending text messages, we’re still using language.
It’s said that the basic grammar and syntax rules of our mother tongue
are “hard-wired” in our heads at an early age. As infants, we listen to
people talking and put the words together and pretty soon we’re talking
too. We’re using language ourselves. “Language” in the sense I’m using
it here, BTW, comes from the French word for tongue and was first used
in early Modern English around 1600, while Shakespeare was still working.
“Talk” as a verb comes from “tale” and “tell” and was first used around
1548, shortly before Shakespeare was born.

As an editor, one of the issues I often address with my authors—both those
whose mother tongue is American English and those who are coming from other
mother tongues—is how their characters talk. Many of my authors start out
writing dialogue that is stiff and unnatural. It’s like they’re writing
the stilted alien dialogue we heard in the sf movies of the 1950s. But
characters in books need to talk like real people. How they talk helps
readers know about them without our having to write lots and lots of exposition
and description.  




“Go sit in the mall,” I keep telling my authors. “Listen to how people
actually talk. Don’t eavesdrop—what they say isn’t important. Listen to
how they say what they’re saying. Listen to their
word choices. Listen to
the rhythms of their sentences. Listen to how regular people use
sentence fragments when they talk, how they use contractions and clichés
and idioms. Pay attention to their verbal tics like ‘like’ and ‘you know.’”




Characters talking right is part of the verisimilitude of a novel. Their
speech has to be appropriate to where they live and to their class. The
numerous dialects of American English reflect our economic and social classes,
geographical areas, levels of education, and other differences in the population.
I’m wondering, though, if the stupid, nearly illiterate “language” of text
messaging isn’t beginning to destroy some of our American English dialects,
at least in writing if not in speaking. Anyone who lives anywhere can write
“OMG” or use numbers as letters (“good 4 u,” “gr8,” etc.) or leave out
the “unimportant” words—like prepositions—of a sentence. It’s the tiny
words and phrases that tell people where we come from. If you listen carefully
to some TV shows, you can tell that though they may be set in New York,
they’re filmed in Los Angeles with writers and actors from California.
Someone living in NYC is not likely to use our west coast “surfer dude”
dialect. Back east, for example, they don’t say “totally” and “majorly.”
Out here we do. Part of the “charm” of
Jersey Shore is that the people talk right. We can tell they’re not
actors from Nebraska or Oklahoma or—OMG!—Santa Monica.




Most of the characters in
Secret Lives speak what is called standard American English plus
some slang and some four-letter words. (Yes, old women know how to cuss.
Why should that be a surprise?) But several characters speak in distinctive
dialects. Two of them—Emma Clare and Madame Blavatsky—are major characters.
I’ll discuss them next week, along with Frances J. Swift.




Let’s start with a few characters that don’t appear in every chapter.
One member of the circle is Verlea, a black woman who was born in New Orleans,
worked as a domestic until she retired, and now lives in the Center Towers
Retirement Residence in Long Beach. At one point, talking about the sorrowful
history of black women in America, she loses both her temper and standard
English. This happens when two characters “adopt” a homeless bag lady named
Coyote, who has suffered so much abuse that she’s nearly dead. I didn’t
want either of these black women to speak “ebonics.” Coyote says very little,
but as far as we know, she’s always been on the streets, so “fuck” is a
major part of her vocabulary. To be sure these two women’s dialects were
appropriate to their characters, I asked two of my speech students at the
university to read Coyote’s story. They made some corrections, which I
gratefully accepted.




It’s always good to get help. I also asked B.J., the daughter of a friend
at Long Beach WomanSpirit, to read the stories in which Janie, who is 11
½ (going on 40), appears. She told me that Janie needed to grow up and
not talk like a five-year-old. Good advice! That’s where the “Motherrrrr”
came from.




Another character who, like Coyote, appears in only one story is Celestia
Wolfe, who is my version of Little Red Riding Hood. She’s in the book because
she has to deliver an important letter to Herta, one of the major characters.
Celestia was supposed to visit Herta in the 1940s, but she somehow wandered
off the path. In her red dress, Celestia looks like a 1940s movie star,
and though she’s managed to learn some English, her syntax is not quite
right. That makes it easy to tell she’s not from here:




   “They told me I would meet the grandmothers here,” she said
after a minute. “Yes. Grandmothers. Yes. How do you do? I am so nice to
meet you.”


   “Well,” said Maude, “you’ve come to the right place for that.
Nearly every woman here is a grandmother—”


   “Can we help you?” Rosa repeated. “At least come on inside.
Don’t you think it’s a bit warm today to be wearing a raincoat?”


   “Yes, thank you for being warm today. With you I will come
inside. There is a room, perhaps?”




It’s her syntax that distances her from the circle and from us. She is
obviously foreign. But I didn’t want her to be too foreign, nor did I want
her to sound like Andy Kaufman, so I kept her language fairly subtle. In
her story (Chapter 8), she is captured by two horny old World War II veterans,
whom I had a lot of fun comparing to Tex Avery’s lust-filled cartoon wolves,
before she is finally able to deliver her message to Herta. I also got
to write a fist fight in that chapter. That was a challenge!




To be continued. Come back next week and find out about the voices of
Emma Clare, Madame Blavatsky, and Frances J. Swift. Each one speaks an
English dialect all her own.