Writing Tools

One of the trickiest and most tempting acts of writing is to render a person's styles of speech. My wife, who grew up in Rhode Island, may have once said to me, "I am going to need a new pattern for a corduroy jumper," but it probably sounded more like, "I'm gawna need a new patten for a cawdurhroy jumpuh." When she pronounced her new married name "Clark" as "Clock," I threatened to name our first daughter Ada (Get it? Ada Clock?)

Each of us speaks -- and sometimes writes -- in a dialect, which means to me, a non-standard form of English defined or influenced by national origin, region, ethnicity, or social class. There are standard dialects, sometimes referred to as the koine of the realm. The word comes from the name of an ancient Greek dialect that was once considered the standard for the Hellenistic world, but its modern usage, as defined by the AHD, is "A regional dialect that becomes the standard language over a wider area, losing its most extreme local features."

In England, at least since the time of Chaucer (about 1380), the standard dialect was the one spoken in or around London, the center of politics and culture. (Think, now, of the language of the BBC.)  Chaucer and Shakespeare both put regional dialects in the mouths of some of their characters to distinguish or satirize their personalities. Chaucer, for example, took two foolhardy university students at Cambridge and had them speak in what would have been considered the unsophisticated dialect of the far north of England. In other words, he made them hicks from the sticks.

One of Shakepeare's laughingstocks was a character in "Henry V" named Fluellen, a pompous fool who spoke in an undeniable Welsh accent. Speaking of Alexander the Great, Fluellen asks, "What call you the town's name where Alexander the Pig was born?" The humor comes from the substitution of Big for Great, and even the funnier dialect switch from Big to Pig.

In the United States, the standard spoken dialect is sometimes called "Generalized American," the form of speech we are most likely to hear from our news anchors. In the dialect geography of American speech, it is not northern but southern language that has been ridiculed for its associations with simple-mindedness and bigotry. This is in itself a form of language prejudice, which all writers must be cautious to avoid.

I learned long ago the hard lesson that there is nothing inherent in a dialect that makes it, in linguistic terms, superior or inferior to another. And yet when we hear or read dialect, it may provoke a powerful response based upon our prejudices. Foreign languages or accents provide useful case studies. When I hear British English, I think "culture." When I hear French, I think "romance." When I hear Italian, I think "passion." When I hear German, I think "dictator." Why such associations? They come not from the language, but from our feelings about the speakers of the language, based on their culture and history -- and ours.

Doug Williams was the first African-American quarterback to lead his team to a Super Bowl victory. He started his pro career with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers but was let go in a contract dispute. The Bucs began to play poorly without him, and when asked by a reporter how he felt about his old team, Williams was quoted as saying, "I hope they be 0 and 16." In other words, he expressed the hope that they would lose all of their games.

In certain dialects, such use of "be," though non-standard, is not a mistake. It expresses time, duration. It indicates that the speaker wanted the team to lose for the long haul. But the quote poses a problem for the writer. Some will read it and think the speaker is ignorant, even characterizing such language as "ghetto," or "Ebonics," or just "black." Of course, a writer could paraphrase the quote, but such cleansing drains the juice from the original.

Writers err when they decide to limit their use of dialect to only certain "colorful" characters in the culture. When author Marshall Frady wrote a famous biography of Alabama governer George Wallace, he would quote the segregationist politician as saying things such as "As long as ahm guvnuh...," and yet he would quote Bobby Kennedy (who spoke in a distinctive New England accent) as if he were Walter Cronkite.

This leads me to some useful advice from E.B. White in his part of "The Elements of Style": "Do not use dialect unless your ear is good." He warns that phonetic spellings of speech can be easily misunderstood. "The best dialect writers, by and large, are economical of their talents: They use the minimum, not the maximum, of deviation from the norm, thus sparing the reader as well as convincing him."

Coming next: Dialect lessons from the masters