I think consistency is the most important. The “additions” I made are all things I’d expect from even standard speech, because they are all things everyone does. Leaving out the “f” of “of” or the “d” with “I’d” just happens. And occasionally skipping over a word, especially a very short one with a soft start (“the”) happens all the time.
I can easily say “all the time” in a way that sounds like “All time” with maybe the L being held out a bit. And yet, in context, I think anyone would transcribe it as “all the time.” Unwritten contractions like this are very common in standard English.
For someone from Sen Ervin’s region / culture reading a transcript of his remarks the written words “I’m just a simple country lawyer” sound in their own head like what would have to be written as "Ahhm jus ta simpull cawntree layer” to sound accurate in my head, acculturated as I am to a very different accent and style of speaking.
Any given publication of written words can only be written one way. If the goal is merely to transmit the raw semantics, accounting for accent and delivery is unnecessary. Court transcripts are an example of this. OTOH, if the goal is to transmit the total “feel” of the delivery complete with culture and tone, an author faces the nigh impossible task of writing in a way that brings out that feel regardless of what accent or style is the default in each individual reader’s head.
That is probably the wisest comment of the thread. Thank you.
And all the more so as the audience for any given writing has expanded worldwide and as giving recognition to differing sensitivities and backgrounds within that wide-ranging audience has gone from ignored to honored more in the breech to now often de riguer albeit still skipped over by various authors for reasons good or ill.
That particular phrase, at least, already carries with it an implied accent. “I’m a simple country lawyer” implies that the person is going to have that country twang. Heck, if you know the reference, you probably just hear it in that voice. The phrase alone serves as a shorthand. No need to “tell.”
In fiction, my main issue with spelling out accents is that it can be hard to read. The implications @Allesan talks about can be mitigated if written well, coming off more like “this person speaks in a different accent than the narrator” rather than “this person speaks incorrectly.” This is much harder in the typical short article.
But you still need to be sparing with it, as you don’t want the person to have to actually sit there and have to figure out what words are being said. And, yes, you can also do some level of “telling” instead of showing–if it seems natural. Or hinting without non-standard spellings, like with the phrase above.
I think you’re both making the (natural) assumption of readers reading silently to themselves. It’s my impression (though I may be wrong) that back in the Old Days, when writing out dialect phonetically was far more common, it was more common than it is now for people to read aloud (to other people), and the phonetic spelling was a way of assisting or even forcing the reader to “do the accent.”
Also, would (say) a mid-nineteenth-century New Englander (or Old Englander, for that matter) have necessarily known what a “heavy Southern accent” sounded like?
Why is it important that they know? How does precisely reconstructing the accent serve the story, anyway? Maybe there should be less of a focus on how a character says something and more on what they’re saying.
Because, at least for some readers, imagining the sights, sounds, and other sensory impressions of a scene is an important part of the enjoyment of reading.
(Why is it important for movie/TV actors to speak with the “correct” accents for their characters? Shouldn’t there be “less of a focus on how a character says something and more on what they’re saying”?)
Spelling out accents by how the character pronounces them makes it really difficult to read. It doesn’t flow and I have to pause and slowly parse out each word.
She spoke with an odd, lilting accent that I couldn’t quite place. Her tone was almost musical, and she was trilling her Ls in a way I was starting to find endearing.
… he said, with a New Yawk accent right out of Central Casting, like a cut-rate De Niro.
I noticed that his Scottish burr, which was mild to begin with, was growing stronger and less comprehensible the angrier he got. If I push him any further, I thought, I won’t be able to understand a word he’s saying.
Yeah, that’s the general problem. Sometimes, you may want to do that in fiction writing to really get across the “otherness” of certain characters, I suppose, but in most cases, as a reader, I just want accents to be hinted at here and there in the writing, so I can, you know, actually read what is being said by the characters.
I’m reminded of a minor character in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love who pronounces her R’s as W’s, à la Elmer Fudd. At some point in mid-chapter, Lawrence stops writing out this pronunciation quirk, apparently on the understanding that it’s getting kind of annoying to read and we can be trusted to imagine her R’s as W’s ourselves.
Well, yeah—I hope it was clear that, in my earlier post, I wasn’t advising writers, especially modern writers, to spell out the accent phonetically. I was explaining why it might have made more sense for writers to do so back a century or more ago when the practice was more common.
Code-switching hasn’t been brought up yet in this thread. If a novelist was portraying a character who did such in a cynical way, I’d be more understanding towards their use of dialect. If one were to transcribe that odious Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, a Rhodes Scholar who talks in an almost impenetrable hillbilly drawl when in front of a camera, I’d get what the author was conveying.
Scots (Lowland Scots, Ulster Scots…not Scots Gaelic) is one of those topics that splits linguists as to whether it’s a language or a dialect. I land on the side of “distinct language” largely because of its long literary tradtition and established syntax. To read Trainspotting or But-n-Ben A Go-Go but in standard English spelling would miss the entire point.
In my experience, even trying to say those pronunciations out loud doesn’t help that much, unless they tell you the accent ahead of time. English is not very conducive to phonetic spelling.
Besides, the author doesn’t know what accent the reader has. They could still easily read many characters in the wrong accent.
I say let us know what the accent is, and then let them mimic if it they know it. If they don’t, then it’s better to read it in their normal accent than to say something that won’t sound like the accent at all, and may not even be understood.
If they can illustrate the particulars of an accent then they should. How much is open to question, but people don’t all use the same pronunciations of words, that’s what accents are. Dialect also includes grammatical differences. If someone says “Ahm a-goin’ to the store” you can write “I’m going to the store” but if it’s important to describe the character or accurately depict the language it needs at a minimum to include “a-going”, and “a-goin” is better.
I agree the use should be limited. I disagree with any idea that highlighting actual differences between people should be called ‘othering’, whatever that is supposed to mean.
