On Writing Dialect and Language

Aye.

Nay.

Isnae, wouldnae, couldnae.

I’m neck deep in editing my next book, which is (spoiler alert) a historical romance set in medieval Scotland, and I’m currently adding regional dialect, Scottish slang and character vernacular. As it stands, the book is about 90,000 words, making it the longest I’ve written yet. It also means I’m going to be seeing Scottish words in my sleep.

As per usual, it wasn’t until I dived into the task that I realised I hadn’t thought it all the way through. On the surface, it seems easy; just make sure the language is correct.

Dig a little deeper though, and worms are found. Lots and lots of worms.

There’s actually a few different things that we’re dealing with. The first is accent, and changing common words into a form that better reflects their phonetic pronunciation. For instance, that the Scottish tend to pronounce ‘no’ and ‘not’ as ‘nay’. This has a flow-on effect to every contraction ending in — nt, like couldn’t, wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, and of course their long forms of could not, would not, and should not. They become couldnae, wouldnae and shouldnae.

Other examples are verra (very), auld (old), and ye (you, which flows onto you’re, you’ve, yourself, etc.).

That’s one aspect. The other is the wholesale replacement of words. You see, the Scots have a lot of weird and wonderful words for things. Ken means to know, or to understand. Bairn is another word for baby. Small is wee. A creek or a small (sorry, a wee) river is a burn. And so on.

The question is, how far to take it?

There’s risk either way. If I have too little Scottish dialect, it won’t seem authentic. Too much though, and it starts to reduce readability and accessibility. Nobody wants to read with a thesaurus next to them, or in this case, a Scottish slang translator.

If you get this balance right though, and ensure the language flows smoothly, the end result is something both easy to read and satisfyingly real.

If you can get the balance right.

I decided that for my novel, I wouldn’t wholesale replace words and dialects throughout the entire text, but rather only do it for the character dialogue. This means that the non-dialogue narrative would be written in plan english, without any Scottish specific terms. I fretted over this decision, though. Would it be jarring, to have only half the book in regional language, and the rest in more neutral prose? To have nay inside the dialogue, and no outside it?

I ultimately decided that by confining it to the dialogue, it strikes the balance of being authentic and yet still accessible. It gives the characters a unique voice, while still allowing the reader to slip back into something more comfortable. And to me, it makes it feel like the story is being narrated by a third character with a voice of their own.

I can definitely see that’s it’s only one way of approaching the problem. By keeping the narration neutral, I am choosing for it to keep itself apart from the characters; aloof and separate. If the book was in first-person POV (rather than the current third-person limited), I’d probably reconsider. For first-person, keeping dialect in the narration would be a great way to emphasise the fact that we are in the character’s heads, seeing, feeling and thinking as they do.

So in a way, it’s purely an artistic decision, and time will tell if readers agree with my interpretation or not.

As far as actually implementing the changes, I want to give a shout out to Scrivener. It’s my go-to software for long-form writing (with Ulysses handling everything else), and a combination of the linguistic focus (only highlighting dialogue), scrivenings mode (being able to view hundreds of separate scene documents as one cohesive whole) and the powerful find-and-replace functionality, meant that I did the entire dialect replacement exercise in one day — all 2749 unique blocks of dialogue. Granted, it was a long day, but I’m pretty happy with that.

Of course, I still need to go back and finesse all the dialogue now that it’s been Scottish-ified (that’s a word, right?). After all, Didn’t I? rolls off the tongue far smoother than didnae I?, and my book is now littered with awkward word combinations.

But hey, it’s a start!