by John Kachuba
Writers of historical fiction know that it’s not only important to get the history right, it’s equally important to create a sense of that history for the reader. Historically accurate settings and details of clothing, architecture, foods, technology, etc. go a long way toward helping the reader fully immerse himself in the story. But one aspect of writing historical fiction that is often given short-shrift by novice writers (and even some pros) is speech; what did people of that time and place sound like?
Historically appropriate speech will make your story that much richer and demonstrate your authority to write that novel, but the minute your sixteenth-century Japanese samurai greets another with, “Sup, bro?” you’ve lost your reader.
To be fair, writing historically accurate speech may be difficult at times, if not impossible. It could be that the language your characters speak may never have been written down or may be extinct—both cases are often true for indigenous peoples.
I encountered that problem when writing my novel, The Savage Apostle, about the events leading up to King Philip’s War in seventeenth-century New England. My historical protagonists were John Eliot, an English missionary to the indigenous people around the Plymouth colony, and Metacom, a Wampanoag sachem. The people of Plymouth originated in England and spoke English with a Northumbrian dialect. Linguists have studied that dialect so it was not difficult in my research to find out how the colonists would have spoken. Eliot, of course, was literate and his writings revealed sentence structure and syntax typical of that time and place.
It was a different story when writing about Metacom and his people. Metacom, who the English called Philip, spoke some English, but his native tongue was Massachusett, an Algonquian language spoken throughout southern New England. The language existed only in oral form until John Eliot, with the help of a Native speaker, translated the Bible into Massachusett. Since Metacom, and some of his people were at least partly bilingual, he speaks English in my novel. But his phrasing differs from that of Eliot’s and the reader understands that English is not Metacom’s first language.
I try to avoid writing dialect; that is, trying to phonetically write what a word sounds like. Dialect can be tricky in that it doesn’t always sound the same to each of us because of our various locations and cultures and if overused it may turn your character into a stereotype or worse, confuse the reader. Here’s an example from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, when the escaped slave, Jim, meets Huckleberry, who he believes is dead:
“Doan’ hurt me—don’t! I hain’t ever done no harm to a ghos’. I alwuz liked dead people, en done all I could for ‘em. You go en git in de river ag’in whah you b’longs, en doan’ do nuffin to Ole Jim, ‘at ‘uz alwuz yo’ fren’.”
Twain had a good ear for dialect but too much may leave your reader struggling to get through it.
What I did to indicate dialect in The Savage Apostle, mostly for the Native speakers, was to insert occasional Algonquin words or short phrases whose meanings become obvious from the context. For example, the repeated word, wetuwamash for the bark and branch shelters built by the Wampanoag, and powwaws for medicine men or shamans.
In The Bottle Conjuror, Jack and I used the same technique for both our Romani and English characters. So, Stefan speaks of gadjos, anyone who was not Romani, vardos for Romani wagons, and patrin, for a Romani directional marker. Lord Cumberland and the other English characters use slang of the times such as swinking, for having sex, John Barleycorn for liquor, mother’s ruin for gin, and bloodybacks for British soldiers. We also used a few Romani phrases that are translated into English on the page, eliminating guesswork on the part of our readers, but still giving them a taste of Romani language and culture.
We made certain that the speech patterns and word choices of our English-speaking characters differed depending on their social status. Cumberland, Montagu, and other members of the aristocracy speak a more formalized version of English than Lucinda and Molly, who are from a much lower social status.
Writing historically accurate speech can be a challenge, but it’s a fun one to take on, an important one. What problems are you having as you write dialogue?
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