The Distinctive Speech of Your Characters

Posted by on Apr 1, 2015 | 4 comments

The Distinctive Speech of Your Characters

Today we look at how an author can create characters with distinctive speech patterns to illustrate their origin from different regions or countries. I hope you enjoy it! Other ideas? Share a comment! 

 

 

 

 

Wandering Wednesdays

Each character in your story needs to have their own unique voice within your voice as an author. The reader will become easily bored if each character uses the exact same words or phrases. How do you make them sound different, and how do you decide what they should sound like, especially when using dialect, without irritating and overwhelming?

Two of the most famous examples of authors who created unique character dialog are Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Reader’s either love it or hate it, but their characters have made an impression on millions over the years.

Your character’s background should include where they came from, their education, and distinct personality traits. This will give you a clue for what kind of speech patterns to look for. Each of us speaks a little different, so you can use nicknames unique to a particular character to help indicate who is talking and relationships between characters. My female protagonist’s long-time friends call her “Bon,” short for Bonny, and even “Carrot-top,” because of her red hair. Her friends in Scotland never use these terms, so it also adds a feeling of long-term familiarity between the characters.

Not all characters in a story come from the same background, even if they currently reside in the same locale, so research needs to be thorough. It’s hard to do if you’ve never been there before, so reading books set in the same setting and time period as your book can help. Watching movies set in the time period and location help you get a feel for it, but you still have to write the dialogue so the reader understands.

When I set my book in Scotland I had to do some research because although they speak English, it’s not the same as Scottish flagin my native New Mexico or even the same as England. So where can you find information about how English is spoken in a unique fashion in different places?

Here are some helpful hints on how I gave my characters from Scotland and New Mexico a distinctive sound. The same can be done for most dialects and languages

  • Visit the location. I would never have known that when ordering water in a Scottish restaurant the waiter will ask if you prefer “still” or “sparkling.” I would have no way to know that when it comes to entering and leaving a place the signs would say “way out” and “way in,” rather than “entrance” and “exit.” My Scottish characters call their phone a “mobile,” while my American characters use “cell phone.”
  • Have someone proof-read or edit that lived in the place your story is set
  • The male protagonist is very educated, but in moments of deep emotion the female protagonist, depending on the POV (point of view) will think to herself that his Scottish burr is becoming stronger. To emphasize it further, he often drops the end of words ending in “-ing,” so “feeling” becomes “feelin’.”
  • Google it. You would be surprised how many articles you’ll find about language and linguistics. Search using terms like “say ‘I love you’ in Scots-Gaelic”
  • Wikipedia
  • Omniglot.com has a variety of pages about pronunciation and even lists of words and common phrases, some by region
  • YouTube has many videos of people speaking and illustrating pronunciation
  • Watch movies set in the place, or better yet, made in the place you are researching
  • Articles about dialect like http://www.whoohoo.co.uk/scottish-translator.asp; lexilogos.com; and freelang.com
  • Internet lists of common slang terms for the region

When using dialect or foreign languages, make certain to italicize the phrase and offer a glossary of terms. This does not work well in Kindle or Nook format, so choose a few common terms that your characters will use and reuse. For example, Land of My Dreams is a romance, so a frequently repeated phrase is “I love you.” In Scots-Gaelic (which does differ from Irish or Manx Gaelic) the phrase is Tha gaol agam ort. Give the phonetic pronunciation in your glossary, in this case, Ha gool akum orsht. I would certainly never have pronounced it like that!

Have a few phrases that will become easily recognizable to your readers, and whenever possible, try to include a translation in the text. For example, in my current WIP, the sequel to Land of My Dreams, the Scottish male protagonist uses the Scots-Gaelic for “my darling” when speaking to the American female protagonist:

 

Mo gràdh…”

My darling, the Gaelic endearment coupled with his tender smile was enough to make her head spin…”

 

The reader immediately learns what the character has said, and it becomes even more romantic when you discover how the female protagonist feels about it.

New Mexico flagThe female protagonist is from New Mexico, a very distinctive region of the United States, and her speech reveals that. She uses words such as adobe, luminaria, chile and chili (the first being the uncooked variety, and the second being the cooked variety), and sopapillas, when talking about her home. She manages to get her Scottish love hooked on New Mexican food, and courageously embraces Scottish dishes by eating haggis and Forfair Bridies.

Once you’ve written a scene using dialect or a foreign phrase, bounce it off a Facebook friend or someone who lives in the area you’re writing about. It is possible to give your story the flavor of another country or a region of the United States in a way that enhances the story and makes the characters unique, without overwhelming the reader.

© Norma Gail Thurston Holtman, March 30, 2015

About the author: 

Norma - LoMD 2014Norma Gail’s debut contemporary Christian romance, Land of My Dreams, released in April 2014. She has led weekly women’s Bible studies for 19 years. Her devotionals and poetry have appeared at ChristianDevotions.us, the StitchesthruTime blog, and in “The Secret Place.” She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers, FaithWriters, Romance Writers of America, and the New Mexico Christian Novelists. She and her husband of 38 years have two adult children.

 Connect with Norma:

www.normagail.org

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorNormaGail

https://plus.google.com/b/102717101441594679714/+Normagail/about/p/pub

http://pinterest.com/normagailth/boards/

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7874459.Norma_Gail

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/norma-gail-thurston-holtman/42/71a/3b2

https://twitter.com/Norma_Gail

Book links:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Land-My-Dreams-Norma-Gail/dp/1941103170/ or

Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/land-of-my-dreams-norma-gail/1119606864 ?ean=9781941103173

Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas Bookstore: http://store.lpcbooks.com/product/land-of-my-dreams/

4 Comments

  1. These are great tips, Normal! I pinned them! Blessings! Can’t wait to refer back to this.

  2. Thank you, Bonnie! I’m so glad you found them helpful!

  3. Hi Ms NormaGail … I’m still a nobody, as I am still an … up-and-coming, struggling-but-wrote-my-first-romance-novel, and finished-now-self-publishing-my-first-children’s-book-in-rhyme wanna-be-christian-author … My name is Martha (friends call me Marti) M Parker! I Just found you and am looking forward to learning more about you and your writings. I’m also very new to this Blogging stuff so please bare with me if I goof up and stumble and fall … I assure you I will pick myself up and move onward, bumps, lumps, scratches, scars and all! … Thanks for lending me a iddy-biddy bit of you writing time. Marti P

    • You’re not a nobody, Marti! You’re somebody with a story to tell. You’ll learn! I’m glad if I can serve as an example!

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