Dialect in Fiction: When Breaking the Rules Is Okay

The standard advice for handling dialect in commercial fiction is to stick to fairly standard forms.

Popular advice says that:

1) You can include more dialect in dialogue as it's not expected to be standard or "correct"

2) You can use a basic pattern to infer a strong dialect, but don't try and reproduce the dialect yourself unless you are very comfortable with it and use it. (More on that here.)

3) You can go "all in" and write a novel completely in nonstandard forms, but this is a risky move that will likely result in lots of agent rejections. It's more possible in the literary fiction rather than genre fiction space.

And this advice is based on these guiding principles:

1) Dialect is likely to break many readers' immersion in the story, which leads readers to stop reading (a commercial consideration for book sales)

2) Reader immersion is not so important for literary fiction, as readers are interested in other stylistic features and are often more prepared to struggle with the prose if they find other compelling reasons to continue reading

What do linguists who study language in society have to say about dialect in fiction?

I was curious to hear what a linguistic anthropologist – a person who studies how people use language in context – would think of the standard advice often given for handling dialect and nonstandard language in commercial fiction.

So I asked the linguistic anthropologist Kevin Kenjar a few questions specifically about Scots.

Who is Kevin Kenjar?

Kevin Kenjar, PhD is an Austrian-American linguistic and cultural anthropologist specialized in language ideologies, nationalism and linguistic landscape studies with a focus on the former Yugoslavia. He completed his PhD in 2020 at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of a forthcoming book, The Street Corner That Started the 20th Century, about linguistic and ideological changes to Sarajevo, viewed through the lens of the street corner at which Gavrilo Princip was shot.

Here goes!

The standard advice for mainstream commercial fiction is to stick to fairly standard forms of English. Don’t pull any tricks that will make the book harder to read for large parts of your audience, and don’t lean into dialect too much (literary fiction can be more flexible). The logic is that doing so will break reader immersion in the book, which is ultimately a commercial consideration as engaged, immersed readers = more sales. What do you think about this?

The promotion of standard varieties of English as a commercial consideration goes hand in hand with what linguistic anthropologists call “standard language ideology.” This is essentially the promotion of a particular language variety, usually that of the upper middle class, which is typically lauded as the clearest, most accessible, and even most “correct” variety.

Importantly, it is also held to be a kind of idealized, homogeneous language that is believed to be linguistically “neutral” insofar as it is largely free of regionalisms that characterize dialects, which may alienate some readers from areas where those forms are not used.

Though it may seem paradoxical, the idealized language held up as the purest variety is also the lowest common denominator, appealing to the largest number of people possible, which is a major concern for commercial interests whose target audiences (or markets) extend across a broad geographical area.

The concern that regional variation may “break reader immersion” seems to be based on the notion that a reader will encounter an unfamiliar word, or a familiar word used in an unfamiliar way, and be pulled out of their immersive reading experience as if jarred from a dreamful sleep.

What is really happening is that attention is being shifted from the message of the text to the code in which it is written. This attention requires a somewhat different kind of engagement from the reader, beginning with the reader’s consideration of who uses such forms. In many cases, even if they may not use a particular regionalism themselves, readers may nevertheless recognize the nonstandard form as distinct to a particular group of people. Furthermore, a reader could always stop and take the time to look up an unfamiliar form. While this would break reader immersion, it would demonstrate a high degree of reader engagement with the text.

Interesting! The mainstream view does, however, suggest you the author use occasional vocabulary items that mark a character or setting as unique, such as “wee” to indicate Scottishness, for example. What’s going on here from a linguistic anthropological point of view?

Readers may recognize nonstandard forms as distinct to particular groups of people, whether from a certain city, region, country, class, gender, ethnic background, etc. All kinds of social and cultural differences are reflected in language, and readers often recognize this, with varying degrees of precision – for example, one reader may recognize a word as “vaguely Scottish” while another would recognize the same word as distinct to “lower-class Glaswegian youth.” In this way, certain words can point to, or index, groups of people that use it. This is what linguistic anthropologists call “non-referential indexicality.”

The word “wee” is an interesting example because it is not only used to indicate Scottishness but is also widely recognized as a distinctly Scottish word in a way that other Scottish words, such as “drouthy,” are not. While the word may be regionally specific, it is nevertheless recognized globally. This word has entered into linguistic “common sense” as a Scottish word, and it is immediately associated with Scotland by people who would never use it themselves.

Why do “voice” novels like Trainspotting and The Young Team, where you learn to read the text differently, have such an appeal to some people?

This is an interesting question. As I said, standard language varieties are widely seen as “neutral” and not regionally marked, but this comes about through sacrificing the authenticity of language. The ways people actually speak are not neutral but are rather full of linguistic markers that indicate not only a particular place but also, and especially, a particular socioeconomic class.

In contrast to novels strictly adhering to standard language varieties, a novel like Trainspotting takes the opposite approach, forsaking the broad accessibility of standard varieties in favor of maximizing authenticity.

With such an approach, it is assumed that readers may be entirely unfamiliar with some of the linguistic forms precisely because it is assumed that the readers are coming from linguistic environments rather different from, in the case of Trainspotting, that of heroin addicts in an economically depressed part of Edinburgh. While the language use may be unfamiliar, it is precisely this aspect that allows readers to immerse themselves in lifeworlds quite different from their own. I suspect it is this opportunity to enter into the worlds of people with radically different life experiences that makes such novels so appealing to some people.

And is it fair to refer to novels like Trainspotting, The Young Team, etc. written in Scots or local vernacular dialects as voice novels? If Scots was standardized, would people still look at these novels differently? If so, how?

While I’m sure there have been various considerations as to what does and does not constitute a “voice novel,” I suspect this categorization has more to do with marketing assessments than with any kind of literary-linguistic criteria. If it simply means written in a nonstandard, and therefore regionally inflected, variety of language, I suppose it would be fair to consider these novels as such.

As to how these novels would be understood if Scots were standardized, this is a tricky question. It would, in part, depend on how Scots were standardized, and on what basis.

If a kind of neutral standardized variety emerged, I imagine it would still look quite different from the slang-filled Edinburgh variety used in Trainspotting, or the North Lanarkshire dialect used in The Young Team.

Keep in mind that language standardization is not just about having some kind of conventional spelling rules or orthography, nor is it only about selecting one particular dialect at the expense of others. It is also about providing the infrastructure for this kind of neutral “voice from nowhere.”

In such a case, novels set anywhere from London to California to Timbuktu could be written in Scots, with readers expected to understand that the authenticity of language has been forsaken in the name of accessibility. Of course, given the hegemony of English, any attempts to render such novels into Scots would almost certainly be made for ideological purposes, such as language revitalization, rather than out of a sincere attempt at making these novels more accessible to a Scottish audience.

Thanks, Kevin, for this super insightful discussion!

If you’re interested in learning more about Scots more generally, I can highly recommend the work of James Costa, who has written the article “On the Pros and Cons of Standardizing Scots.”

I’ve also heard good things about the science fiction novel Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel written in Scots and English together.

If you have any thoughts on this, or links to other great novels written in Scots, just hit reply! It would be great to get a discussion going.

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