Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this because it kind of concerns dialogue, but oh well. How would I go about writing certain dialects of American English, especially when it is 2 dialects sort of mishmashed together? For context, my protagonist in my story is intended to speak Cajun Vernacular English (due to spending the first ten years of his life in the Acadiana region of Louisiana) but with some elements of North-Central American English (which is from him living in Northwestern Wisconsin during his adolescence). Another character speaks with a mix of Inland Northern American English and Appalachian English. The story takes place in the Great Lakes region in the 1970s if that's helpful. I'm just curious about how I would go about writing these dialect combinations in a manner that is accurate, realistic, readable, and respectful? I already know that writing it out phonetically is a major no-no.
In my experience people who've picked up more than one accent don't really speak in a blend of those accents, rather they switch between them based on circumstances. Like if they're talking about a subject that reminds them of or they feel is somehow associated with one or the other milieu they'll switch to that accent.
It takes about five minutes of conversation with someone from the land of my birth for me to begin speaking in that accent again. Makes me crazy.
This was my response to a similar post about American accents. Sometimes listening to speakers can help you write it. If you'd like references for authors that write in a "southern accent", read the short story called "Gilded Six-Bit" by Zora Neale Hurston and a few of Eudora Welty's short stories have southern dialects in them.
I am 78 years old. I have lived in several states, been to (or at least through) almost all of the continental United States, and have traveled to several foreign countries. Oh -- did I mention that I took coursework in Linguistics in college? I took coursework in Linguistics in college. With that as background, I'll just say that I have never encountered, or even considered the possibility, of either Cajun Vernacular/North-Central American English or Inland Northern American/Appalachian English. I don't even know what you consider to be the difference between "North-Central American" and "Inland Northern American" English. Essentially, you are creating the characters who share these mixed influences. While there's a small mathematical possibility that there may be someone, somewhere, who actually speaks with one or the other of these mixed accents/dialects, the likelihood is extremely small. That means there is effectively no way to convey them "accurately," so my suggestion would be for you to just write them as they sound to you in your imagination -- since that's where they exist. Another point in favor of just writing them as you think they sound: my college Linguistics professor told us that a trained linguist can listen to someone talk for five minutes and, if that person has always lived in the same place, the linguist can tell where the person is from within 25 miles (actually, might have been 15 miles). There's a string of about four of five small towns along a river near where I grew up. We always knew if a new acquaintance came from one of those towns -- instantly -- by the way they enunciated a couple of key sounds. Some years ago I was working in a town not too far from New York City. I used to go to a Subway shop for lunch frequently, and a woman behind the counter had a familiar accent. Finally, one day I got brave enough to ask her if she was from Bangor (Maine). She just stared at me. She was indeed from Bangor, but she hadn't lived there for twenty years. She couldn't believe that her accent had stayed with her for that long. My point being that your rather general descriptions of accents or dialects as associated with broad geographic areas are far to general to really pinpoint an accent or dialect. Which, IMHO, is just another reason to make it up as you go along.
