Today, on International Mother Language Day, we pay tribute to our first languages, the ones our mothers cooed to us in our cradles. Why I didn’t grow up with a West Texas accent is a mystery. As Visual Thesaurus writer Orin Hargraves says, the term “mother language” also suggests “the source, inspiration, or protector of something”—in this case, the valuable developmental skill of communication.
Lots of online commentary—snarky Facebook posts, helpful grammar websites—tackle the topic of “correct” language. But what is correct, under what set of rules? For writers of fiction, not just the grammar characters use, but also the word choices, diction, and rhythm of speech support development of distinctive voices.
S.A. Cosby’s wonderful Razorblade Tears meticulously captures the small-town Virginia speech patterns of the Black protagonist, Ike, as well as his down-and-out white partner in crime, Buddy Lee. Stephen Graham Jones creates a pitch-perfect rendering of the rhythm of Blackfeet tribe members’ speech in The Only Good Indians. (I read audio versions of both these memorable books, in which the language was further elevated by the quality of the narration.)
In Anglophone countries, “Standard English” is what educated white people speak. But even in England, many people don’t speak it. Just ask Henry Higgins. Like him, critics of people who speak nonstandard English are affronted by perceived lapses. “The ways in which some white speakers feel licensed to disparage black speech,” Hargraves says, “is not different in kind from the way the Britons, starting in the 1600s, disparaged the speech of Americans.”
Like all languages, English evolves. Reading novels from the 18th, 19th, and even the early 20th century demonstrates how vastly different are today’s ways of expressing ourselves. My story “The Adventure at Sparremere Hall” is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and part of the challenge of writing itwas to immerse myself in the loquacious, roundabout style of John Watson who “wrote” more than a hundred years ago. Here’s a short paragraph. “This looks promising, I thought, and with a breath of anticipation, I slit the envelope with my paper knife. The letter was indeed intriguing, and when I came to the end I was quite uncertain how the great detective would react to it.” Today, we’d say, “There’s an intriguing letter here, Holmes. Listen up.” This is to say, what is the “correct” or “ideal” English speakers should aspire to? The expression “how fun!” first struck me as awkward and ungrammatical. But it’s useful, and everyone understands what I mean.
Although many people decry nonstandard English, Hargraves points out that dialects and vernacular speech do follow rules, just a different set of them. The people who speak those variants know their rules, which is essential in order for them to communicate with others who share that dialect. Consensus wins out in a population of speakers, Hargraves says, and “the way most people in a community speak has a way of becoming the way that everyone speaks.”
From a writer’s point of view, it isn’t possible to merely throw in a few “ain’ts” or drop a few “g’s” in order to establish a rural character. You have to develop an ear for it, to feel it, like Cosby and Jones do. Then the reader will feel it too.
My latest historical fantasy novel has a couple of characters who speak nonstandard English, and I have extensive theater training, so I wrote their dialogue as I heard it in my head. My editor was concerned that “cancel culture” would despise the book because of my “whypeepo” attempt to capture the sound of nonstandard speech. I respect my editor a great deal, so I ended up standardizing most of these characters’ words, retaining just a sprinkling of what I heard in my mind.
Interesting. Maybe “a little goes a long way,” in the sense that the suggestion of a style of speech carries into how the reader “hears” the rest of what the character says. Certainly, the old-fashioned “eye-dialog” with dropped g’s and so forth is hopelessly out of date (and super-hard to read!) All those apostrophes! I sometimes just leave out letters and no apostrophe. “Leave im alone.” “Dyou think he did it?” A weak compromise? I’ll bet with your theater training, you did a great job!
Interesting comments on your “accent acquisition,” Vicki. I came up with the theory that humans have an instinctive need to communicate, and tend to “mirror back” the sounds they hear. This affects certain individuals more than others. Some people hear a dialect and repeat back the sounds in their effort to be more readily understood.
I’ve always been fascinated by the way language, particularly English, evolves. Your comment about accents also intrigued me. I personally seen instances where people acquire a regional or foreign accent after becoming immersed in another dialect, while others who are transposed do not. I always wanted to do a linguistic paper on the subject, but never got around to it.
Probably not so much now, but when I was young and visited my grandparents in Texas for a couple of weeks or went to London, I came home with it. But it soon faded . . .