I really, really liked the way Mark Twain portrayed dialect. He didn't tweak spelling all the time, just some of the time (one example that really sticks out to me is his use of "gwyne"). I think spelling words phonetically (tricky as it is to do in English--HOW many ways can we pronounce "-ough" again?) is like a spice or seasoning: using it judiciously can really spice up the dialogue, but overuse it and it can overwhelm the piece.

I have to say I enjoyed the way Irvine Welsh wrote Scottish dialect in Trainspotting, though, and he did it mostly through spelling. I had the sense that not only was he trying to portray a certain class, level of education and nationality with his use of dialect, but to indicate the junkies' outsider status.

Oooh, sorry to double-post like this, but here are a couple of grammar/syntactical quirks about Chinese (specifically, Hokkien):

- We don't conjugate verbs.
- We don't use "to be" before adjectives. Instead of "she's short" or "he's stupid," literal translations of Chinese sentences would read as "she short" or "he stupid." Or, even more literally, "it short" or "it stupid," since our pronouns are not gender-specific.

One of my old high school English teachers would have loathed this discussion on how to show language variation in written pieces. Come to think of it, she didn't approve of many things we commonly did in writing. We were not allowed to use the word 'nice' in compositions, or write 'didn't' instead of 'did not' (even in dialogue) and she once put red pen through my attempt at writing about the young girl I used to babysit and the first full sentence she really said to me. I wrote that she said 'a dot a wawa' - she was waving a flower at me (I've got a flower). If I'd written it as 'I've got a flower' - there is no way you would think an almost 2 year old had said it.
Oh, and I love accents (admittedly some more than others). When I was living in the UK, a survey was conducted on women's reactions to regional accents within the UK. The women were played an audio tape of men from various regions reading the same piece of poetry and most people were pretty surprised when the Geordie got voted the most popular. (The Geordies being the inhabitants of old Northumbria in NE England and I suppose these days mainly associated with the Newcastle area).
Now that's an interesting book cover on today's entry. I would definitely pick that one up in a bookshop.

Thanks for tackling this topic. Bad renditions of dialect really grate on my ear, but I've got little consciousness of the elements that go into a good working rendition. Looking forward to more tools for thought here.

I love this discussion and look forward to the next bit. Some thoughts:

Alot of other (especially Asian) languages don't use tenses and they express the concept of time differently. For instance, in Chinese, you might put an adverbial clause in to indicate when an action occured ("Wo zuotian chi fan" which translates as "I yesterday eat"). You might use some other element to indicate that an action has happened or is going to happen. For "I've already eaten", you might say "Wo chi fan le" whereby the "le" is used to indicate that an action has been completed. Or if you were speaking Malay, you might use a modal verb as in "Saya sudah makan" (I already eat). So someone who is a native speaker of one of these languages might impose their native syntactic structure on the language they are less familiar with. They might then say, "Yesterday, I eat".

In Malaysia (as I'm sure is the case in many other postcolonial countries), there is often a mix of English and Malay/Chinese usage in daily conversation. So you might say "I makan alreadylah." and no one would think anyless of you. The other thing I thought might be of note is how people switch their dialect or way of speaking as they move between cultures. I do this as I flip between cultures. We do this with our accent too but we also do it with grammar and the words we use etc. So if someone in Malaysia asked me "Have you eaten?", I might say "I makan already" but if a born and bred Anglo Australian were to ask me that I would be more likely to say "I"ve already eaten, thanks." Sara, as your novels are about the contact with other cultures and ways of being as much as anything else, when you write the dialogue for your characters in this hybrid environment, do you consciously make the characters alter their way of speaking to suit different listeners? I remember Simon's Scottish accent getting stronger in places but was wondering whether the characters tone up or down their dialect in other ways as well.

My favorite personal story about accents… First, my father’s family was from rural Florida, near Gainesville. I now lived in North Carolina. While North Carolina accents are southern, they are quite different from the various Florida accents. I was going home after a day’s work, having turned on the car radio, but couldn’t hear what the people in the interview were saying. Still, I had a very positive impression of the interviewee – he must be a kind, loving person, very like my father’s brothers. It certainly didn’t register with me that it was his accent that was giving me this warm, fuzzy feeling of nostalgia. So, wanting to know who he was, I turned up the radio. He was Ted Bundy, soon to be executed as a serial killer of girls at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

asdfg -- crickey. That would have given me nightmares, but then it's a great demonstration on how language serves to delineate social and geographic alliances.