Awn Die-uh-log

[gaudior]

Soe sumwun awn uh blawg Ai wuz reading wuz tawking uhbaowt haow uhnoying it iz when writ'rs spell aowt thuh speech uv peepull uv uther backrownds tuh show diffrence.* End haow distuncing it iz fer peepul uv thuh backround being purtrayed. End haow if ennee-wun'z die-uh-log wuz writt'n aowt that way it wouhd look uhbsurd.

Whut d'yoo gaiz think?

--Arr.


Thuh Hip-Hop Nurd sed, here: As a sort of aside, I truly hate it when Black characters or any characters of color have their dialogue spelled out phonetically by White authors. It immediately creates a divide by making their dialogue difficult to understand at a glance. In fact, I'm sure if anyone's dialogue was written out phonetically it would look absurd.

Comments

[weirdquark]

Didn't someone say that Gojyo's dialogue in the original Japanese manga is written really oddly and you have to read what he's saying aloud to have any idea what he's saying?

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Yes--I've been trying to explain this to a couple of beta-readees for years. Southern dialect (as though there were only one) is often the worst victim. Possibly too much exposure to Rogue's dialogue in the X-Men comics.

[sovay]

End haow distuncing it iz fer peepul uv thuh backround being purtrayed. End haow if ennee-wun'z die-uh-log wuz writt'n owt that way it wouhd look uhbsurd.

We had a panel about this at Readercon! rosefox and I came up with it. I wonder if anyone knows how it went.

[badoingdoing.livejournal.com]

This makes me think someone should write a novel where all narration is written with standard English orthography, and all dialogue is written in the IPA.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Whoa.

P.S. to gaudior: When I first scanned your post, I thought to myself, Is that Korean? I didn't know you knew Korean!

[angstnokami.livejournal.com]

THAT WOULD BE AWESOME

[pastwatcher]

Exactly: I was going to say that if one was planning to do this, one ought to use IPA.

[badoingdoing.livejournal.com]

Reading such a novel would also be the best way I can think of to become fluent in reading IPA. Because it's *just* close enough to English that you can start out by faking it, and you can get better at it as you go on.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Copy editing it could be a real pain, though. You might need to supply two or three copies of the dialog, one with the IPA for publication and one with the dialog in normal English (and one with approximate phonetics indicated in English?), where a linguist/phoneticist makes sure the publication copy is consistent and reasonably matches up with the internal-for-review translations, and the copy-editor could maybe then mostly ignore the phonetics.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

I've seen this issue mentioned (possibly here) before, and I feel like the more interesting questions is not whether doing it that way is a bad idea (I totally agree), but what are the good ideas in this space? In other words, what are the various effective ways of writing dialogue in which speakers have different ways of speaking? Difference here can run from characters who speak the same language and dialect, but have different personalities and ways of talking (and different things to say), through characters who speak different dialects, to characters who speak different languages entirely.

I think the solution is going to depend on the needs of the scene, and on the intended readership. Will your audience be bilingual in the same two languages as the characters? Then just use both languages? Is one of the characters having a hard time understanding another? Then this has to be made plausible to the reader, one way or another.

But yeah, mangling the dialogue of a character of group of characters for an entire work just to indicate that they speak a different dialect from some other characters (or even worse, if the characters all speak the same dialect which is different from that of the author or presumed typical reader), doesn't seem like it could ever succeed without being off-putting and condescending, unless it were so subtle as to not really count as an instance of that phenomenon.