Voices! Let’s talk about voices and the rather unique position the English language has when it comes to them. It’s, after all, the lingua franca of the modern world… or is it? There are different English dialects, after all, and there is a question of how they mix together within the bounds of a single work. An issue that’s a bit of a personal problem for me in my endeavours.
So for some context, let’s get into those specific problems. My game obviously takes place in Britain; it’s also written in British English. But it also takes place in the modern world, meaning that the dialect of English known to most is American English. This leads to some questions about the usage of both within my writing. We can divide them into a few different cases:
- the narrator’s voice,
- the speaking voice of characters,
- the writing voice of characters.
So let’s take a look at all of those in order.
1) The narrator
This is actually the most straightforward case. Unless there’s a reason why the narrator should use a specific dialect, you can pick whatever you want and stick with it. Note that I don’t think that just because my game takes place in the UK, I am in some way obliged to use British English. My narrator is impersonal to the plot. I prefer writing in British English and have always been doing so.
That said, if the narrator is also a character in the story, there might be reasons why it would be better for them to write in British or American English. So it should really match what would fit them most as a character. But then…
2) Characters speaking
I don’t think the issue is even that complicated; what’s actually difficult starts here. So you have a single narrative where you have both characters that would be using American English and British English. So whatever you choose for your narrator’s voice, you will still have to deal with characters that align with that and those that do not.
Thus the question becomes… does the off-dialect character’s dialogue still end up rendered in the narrator’s dialect or not?
To get deeper into this, we must first consider one more thing – the purpose of language in writing, as in… a language (like English or French or Akkadian, maybe even Klingon), not the grammar or vocabulary considerations. We often read works in [insert language here] even though if we think about it, the language in question might not be the language the characters speak, which might even be fictional.
Think about The Lord of the Rings, it’s written in English, but none of the characters in the series speaks English. So instead, they use the many languages of Arda. Sometimes they even switch between them in different scenes, depending on the other characters they are communicating with at the time.
But English is the language you understand (or you don’t and read a translation, or know a different language and read it in that language even though you could have read the original… maybe a topic in its own right, really). As such, the writer uses it to convey whatever he wants to say.
So, to make this communication possible, we accept it as natural for a language to represent other languages when characters speak for clarity. Because we can’t all know Elven, Klingon, and Adeptus Mechanicus binary (except not the Martian dialect, but rather the Uraniborg 1572 one!) and need a common language platform to understand the fiction we are partaking in.
But then again, are British and American English so different from each other that it would constitute a barrier?
Essentially, a character speaking American English can communicate with one speaking British English and a reader who knows either would also understand both. So that cuts out many of the usual issues related to how we use language in writing to communicate meaning. Additionally, it’s definitely possible to use dialect-specific vocabulary as part of both characters’ voices. That’s one thing I directly touched upon when writing the first part of this sub-series.
But then, what about spelling? Should we still stick to the narrator’s spelling or use what matches the character’s dialect? This is also difficult because English is not a phonetic language. As such, spelling differences do not translate to phonetic differences in pronunciation, nor does English (in any dialect) possess the tools to represent such differences.
I wouldn’t say there’s a clear choice as to which approach might be better. However…
3) Characters writing
The situation changes when we consider writing represented within a narrative, especially when said writing is directly and visually presented to the reader. This doesn’t usually happen in books, but it sometimes might. Let’s go back to that LotR example. Or rather, the Hobbit. The map seen in that book is somewhat iconic, and is a pretty interesting example of language use. It contains both Latin (English actually) and what appears to be some form of Fuþark (and, well, it actually sort of is precisely that, because this map was done before Tolkien developed this own Fuþark-like script for the dwarves, which he called Cirth). From a narrative perspective, it contains a mix of things Bilbo, as the point of view character for the book, understands and what he does not.
Now to turn to my case, when I have the player character read a book written in American English, is there any reason for me not to render the pages using the American spelling? Or is rendering it like that only important when I deal with, say, Hebrew? You know, primarily used in the same way the dwarven is on the Hobbit map… including having a meaning accessible to those who can read it. However, we usually find that a work’s dialect is consistent, both with spoken and written text representations. The reason for this is, at least as I can tell, dialect inertia. When an author begins writing in one dialect, it spreads to encompass the whole work, particularly when editing the text for errors.
In this case, I’m very strongly inclined to render the texts using the spelling appropriate to the character writing the text. This goes as far as sometimes including errors in the text, which I would want to edit out of the narration. However, for a written text visible within the narrative as that exact text, it offers some flavour without impeding the reader and raising questions concerning what the heck even is English orthography.
Esoteric Musings... 