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Linguistic Differences



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Thu Jun 02, 2016 7:53 pm
Werthan says...



What's the best way to portray linguistic differences in a story? I'm planning out a book that takes place in a fictional world, and no one there speaks English since English doesn't exist, but anything that the main character of a section can understand is glossed as English. People speaking with different accents and using different words and grammar (as well as different languages) is pretty central to a lot of things, and that would be easy to depict in a movie or something without being irritating but hard in a book. Basically, language is one of the main things I use to highlight the differences between cultures, since it's more readily visible than "these people worship different gods from us" or things like that, although that definitely gets described in-depth as well.
Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trĂ¼ber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde

(And as long as you don't have
This: Die and become!
You are only a gloomy guest
On the dark Earth)

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  





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Thu Jun 02, 2016 8:25 pm
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Holysocks says...



I know you know this, but... I still want to say it because of part of what you said.

Basically, language is one of the main things I use to highlight the differences between cultures, since it's more readily visible than "these people worship different gods from us" or things like that, although that definitely gets described in-depth as well.


Personally, I think language is the hardest and less visible aspect of a culture. Yes, off-paper accents and different tongues are one of the first things you notice when you meet people. But there is a hell of a lot more ways to paint a picture of culture, and I personally feel there's a lot better ways, too. Think about about everything in our culture: music, food, sports, books, fashion, dance, fighting styles. What is considered appropriate and what is considered not appropriate in our culture? You can identify a character as a certain culture (depending on your genre/era, I suppose) pretty easily by their dress alone. Say you have a culture in which the married women wear knee-high socks, right there you can quickly state that and then the reader can not only tell when someone is of that culture presumably, but they can also tell she's married.

You mention that language might be easier than mentioning that so-en-so worships thus-en-such, but since you are already going to go into depth with that, it would be pretty simple to have one culture perhaps mumbling under their breath a prayer to their Lava King or whatever. "Lava King, have mercy on our tattered souls." :P

So maybe, rather than accents- though I have known some books to state that some characters have different accents, but not actually reflect that in the writing, which worked fine - but I mean rather than having dialect take over your dialogue, you might want to consider slipping things like what I mentioned into the dialogue. Prayers, phrases liken to a certain culture. Maybe there's a culture in which everyone has an "ly" on the end of their name...? Or something like that, where the names are easily seen as part of that group.

I hope that was somewhat helpful.
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Wed Aug 10, 2016 4:33 am
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RacheDrache says...



Hey there! I'm Rach. We just met in chat, and then I kinda stalked you and found this thread. I have a BA in Linguistics and eventually want my PhD in Linguistics, so I'm excited about basically linguistics anything. Like these questions!

On a quick literary theory note, readers will (as well as viewers) readily accept that the characters aren't *actually* speaking English. Countless Nazi/WWII movies have been made that take place entirely in Germany...entirely in English. Mainly because movie studios want to maximize profit and most mainstream movie-goers won't sit through a movie where they have to read subtitles the entire time. But, luckily for studios, viewers accept the language shift without a second thought.

And readers of fantasy do the same thing. We subconsciously accept that the author has glossed the dialogue for us because reading a made-up language would be incredibly tedious. All you need to do to maintain the illusion is:

1. Never refer to the language as English. Call it High Mountain Speak or New Elven or Mikkish or whatever it is. Typically, a language is named after the people who speak it.

A quick side note about "Common Tongues":
Spoiler! :
Common Tongues show up everywhere in the fantasy world because authors are too lazy to deal with characters without a mutual language. In reality, it would be highly unlikely that there would be a "Common Tongue" that everyone miraculously knows. It's far more likely that merchants and others who travel might speak a pidgin of sort to communicate with each other. But it's highly unlikely that all the merchants would all travel to all the same places, so really you'd have a whole bunch of pidgins that would not be mutually understandable. For the pidgin to evolve into a creole (a full language), you would need to smash two cultures together, have them develop a pidgin, and then have the children grow up speaking the pidgin.


2. Don't make jokes that are language-based. Aka, no puns. Because whatever that language is that they're really speaking, it is nearly impossible that it would have the same pun.

3. Avoid English idioms. By definition, idioms are language-specific. They don't translate. I once told someone in German that I was "Playing a song for them on the world's smallest violin"... and well, that didn't quite work out. Make up idioms that are appropriate for the world.

Now! Onto your questions.

People speaking with different accents and using different words and grammar (as well as different languages) is pretty central to a lot of things, and that would be easy to depict in a movie or something without being irritating but hard in a book,


Portraying language variety is SO MUCH FUN. Yes, it is difficult, but it also SO MUCH FUN! So flip that frown upside down and get ready for some linguistics awesomeness, ja?

First, regarding accents: Everyone speaks with an accent. Absolutely everyone. Or, more precisely, "Everyone speaks with an accent but me." And no one language variety ('accent') is superior to another, although one might have more prestige associated it. Take, for instance, Queen's English in Britain versus a Deep Southern Drawl in America. Queen's English is super prestigious because of who speaks it, but linguistically it is no more sophisticated or superior or better than Drawl or Cockney or Valley Girl.

So, in your world you might have the Mountain People (bear with me, I'm just making up examples) and the Sea Folk and the Forest Dwellers. They all speak a variety of the same language.. A Dweller can understand a Person and a Folk just fine. But while the Folks *can* understand the Dwellers , they don't like them at ALL and therefore stigmatize Dweller-speak, calling it uncouth and barbaric, even though it's not. Because the Folks have economic and political clout, Dweller speak is seen as less prestigious and as dumb. Meanwhile, the People think Sea-speak is distasteful too, but they don't have much in the way of clout. So, the Mountain People fiercely cling to their language as it is and try to differentiate themselves as much as possible from the Sea-speak. The Dwellers just wanna be popular with the Sea Folk, so they try to assimilate the languages.

And around and around it goes. Mountain People, after several generations, have a language that is NOT mutually understandable with the Sea Folk and the Forest Dwellers. The Forest Dwellers keep wanting to speak like the Sea Folk, but the Sea Folk want to sound different from the Dwellers, so as their languages change to make those goals happen, they remain fairly mutually intelligible.

Now, back to portraying the differences. NEVER EVER attempt to phonetically render the speech. For one thing, it makes no sense because they aren't actually speaking English. For another, English is about as unphonetic a language as it gets.

If we all spoke English as it's spelled, we'd sound a whole lot different. Even the Queen's English isn't spelled phonetically. Which means that if you only phonetically render one or two of the varieties, you're stigmatizing them. If you're gonna phonetically render, you have to do it for ALL of the dialogue, but that would get incredibly obnoxious. And, as previously mentioned, in a fantasy world it *makes no sense*.

So, don't try to spell things phonetically.

What you CAN do, however, is give the illusion of accents and variety.

Let's say the Sea Folk are typically quite direct and to the point. It's customary to focus on your own darn business and to get to the point when talking to someone. Not big on small talk, you could say. Business might go down like this:

Joe walks into the store. "Hello. I need two bags of flour."

Jane puts out two bags of flour. "Six silver bit."

"I'll give you four."

"Five." She holds out her hand.

"Okay." He gives her the coins and takes the flour and leaves. "Goodbye."

Now, maybe the Mountain Folk are known for taking their time. They really value the community. As such, maybe the same exchange goes down like this:

Joe leaves his house to go to the store. On the way he sees Old Lady Mable struggling with her firewood. So he goes and helps her with that. "Oh, Lady Mable, please let me help you. How are you today?"

And then they go inside. Mabel makes tea and they chat about her grandchildren and his wife and those Joneses, did you hear what happened to their farm? Then Joe says that he was off to get flour to take to their farm, and Old Lady Mabel apologizes for keeping him so long, and he insists it was no bother, does she need anything from the store?

And their goodbye takes another fifteen minutes before Joe is back on the street. He says hello and small-talks with three other villagers. Yes, it's just terrible about the Joneses. And did you know Old Lady Mabel's husband died three years ago today? You should drop by to say hello. By the way, how is little Johnny?

Joe gets to the store. He greets Jane with a warm smile, but she is talking with another customer. So he joins the conversation. Naturally, the talk is about the Joneses and their farm. Everyone is going to get together to go rebuild. Joe is going to bring them some flour for their bread. And Jane says the flour just came in from the Millers.

Did you hear about the Miller's boy? He fell down the well, but he should be alright, they think. Yes, boys will be like that sometimes. They really should teach him to take better care, isn't that a shame?

Oh, the poor Jonses's daughter! First the farm, and then to learn her friend the Miller's boy fell down the well!

And Joe pays for the flour--three silver coins, no haggle--and they continue to chat for some time before he leaves the store.

You get the idea.

Those are two extremes on the cultural ends, exaggerated for emphasis. Several crucial... eh, let's call 'em "traits"... of cultural/language variety came up in each of those:

Greetings
-Whom do you greet? How do you greet them? When do you greet them? Do you ask questions about them and their family? Or are questions highly rude and intrusive? What's polite? What's rude? How does religion factor in?

Communication between genders
-What interactions can you have with a member of the opposite sex? Are certain topics off limits? Is it "unwomanly" for a woman to talk of politics? Is it unmanly for a man to take interest in his neighbor's farm? Do women haggle? Can a woman haggle with a man? If you're courting someone, do you have to relay everything you say to each other through a friend?

Inter-generational interactions
-How do you talk to elders? In some groups, what Joe did with Mabel's firewood would be quite rude. Not the carrying of it, but the fact that he said "Oh, let me take that." There's a command, an imperative, in that sentence! He commanded an elder! Politely, to do a nice thing, but still. Is that rude, or perfectly fine?

Maybe among the Forest Dwellers, Joe would have done this instead:

"Good morning, Good Lady Mable. Please, may I take this firewood for you?"

Or:

"Good morning, Good Lady Mable. That firewood looks very heavy. May I take it for you?"

Or maybe he's still being too direct, and maybe among the Forest Dwellers, such a statement like that last one implies that she is incapable of taking the firewood herself, which is a no-no among them. So he would instead say something like:

"Good morning, Lady Mable. I hope you are well. If there is a way that I can help you, would you please let me know?"

****

Now, I know you were most interested in the more technical ways to show differences, aka give the illusion of language variety. Here are the crucial ways two varieties of the same language might vary:

-Word choice. In California, it's soda. In the Pacific Northwest, it's a pop. Elsewhere, it's a Coke, even when it's Dr. Pepper. Or maybe all of it's soda pop. Or cola. Maybe the Mountain People call their silver coins "barkles' while the Sea Folk call them "bits." It has to be something unique to your world, ish. Won't do for one group to call it water and the other to say aslrnaralrnjqrkjad.

-Slang. Each group will have their own. Each generation of each group will have their own.

-Swearing. If they share a common religion, there will be some profanities in common. But who they swear to and how (and how profane it is) will vary.


You can also play with syntax, some. Maybe some groups are very particular about speaking in the conditional mood. Maybe some opt for the simple past over the past progressive.

Maybe Joe leaves his house saying, "I go to the store now." Or maybe he says, "I am going to the store." Or maybe it's "I will be at the store." Or "Should I be at the store later, might there be something you want?"

And... that's what I got as of right now. I'm running out of steam! I've been writing this post for like an hour now.

Anyway, let me know if you have questions. I'm hesitant to give you too many ideas because I write fantasy as well and I worked hard on developing the subvarieties! But this should give you some fodder.

Best,
Rach.
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