MORE on DIALECT

By Sharon May

Recently, I’ve had two occasions to discover more about dialect. First, I “zoomed in” on the SCWA Summer Series, which addressed dialogue, and naturally, the conversation turned to dialect. Second, I received a critique of a chapter of my novel. The reviewer suggested I limit the use of dialect. On both occasions, I realized many people think dialect is best found, or only found, in dialogue and in alternate spellings. That is a too simplified and limited interpretation of dialect.

I have learned over the past 60 years that readers and listeners of English apparently believe there is no dialect being used if the tale is told in Standard American English. Not being flippant, but that is a dialect, and actually, the privileged dialect, and thus, preferred by editors, publishers, and maybe even readers because that is what they are most used to.  

After trying to read William Faulkner or James Joyce, most people may hate works that are written in other dialects. These authors take on the task of writing phonetic spellings, which complicates the readers’ task even more.

My narrators, who are also characters, have unique (I hope) voices, each using a form of eastern Kentucky Appalachian English. Note that someone from the mountains of Maine will have a different dialect than someone from my hometown, though both are geographically Appalachian. A speaker in Maine is apt to speak quickly, and often use run-ons, while Kentucky hillbillies tend to mumble at about medium to slow speed, and like my narrator Lafe drop words and thus, have more fragments.

Dialect is more than just some odd pronunciations and spellings. I tend not to use phonetic spellings, which the reviewer suggested as an alternative, since they can mark the narrators/speakers as lower class and/or uneducated, which are both stereotypes of hillbillies.

Dialect is also about word choice, colloquialisms, and sentence structure, which mirror the way a character or narrator thinks and engages with other characters and the audience. Lafe has a tendency to drop first-person pronouns at the beginning of sentences. The reviewer suggested no one really talks like that and thus somewhat distracting.

I know several people who speak, write, and I assume, think the way Lafe does. While I may reduce how often he drops words, I do plan to use this pattern for his voice. It is the way he thinks and speaks. Sounds weird, but he’s been that way since the first time he spoke to me.

The use of dialect isn’t simply to establish characters’ speech, but to immerse us in new worlds. My goal for the novel is to depict eastern Kentucky as it was in the 1980s. To do so, I want to create authentic voices to emphasize the diversity and complexity of the region. That requires the use of dialect to its fullest extent.

Read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove for examples of effective use of dialect.