“I’m not really from arand ’ere,” he volunteered. No shit. Brighton was the gay capital of England. No one here was from around here. Besides, with the spray tan and the accent, he might as well have been wearing a sticker that read I’m from Essex, ask me how. “I’m staying wif a mate.”
He seemed to know where we were going, at least. We crossed the road and cut through a park, Brighton’s pale Georgian buildings gleaming on all sides.
“You don’t say a lot,” he observed.
“I have nothing to say.”
“Pity, you sahnd well nice.” Oh, that glottal stop. Pih-e.
“You said I sounded like the Queen ten minutes ago.”
“Yeah, but like,” a thoughtful pause, “sexy wif it.”
One of the elements of Glitterland that attracted the most comment (both positive and negative) was Darian’s dialect. Because the book was so resolutely narrated from Ash’s perspective, I felt that it was very important to give Darian his own distinctive voice, and a big part of that was to try to capture the patterns and rhythms of his Essex accent.
I was aware from the outset that this was going to present me with problems. There were logistical issues to think about – like making sure that an audience which would predominantly consist of non-Brits would actually be able to understand what was being said – but at least as important to me were what you might call the social issues. Language is profoundly political and it’s very easy, when portraying a non-standard accent, to think of it as just being a layer of “mistakes” applied over the top of standard pronunciation, rather than as a something complete and self-consistent.
There’s a nasty tendency to assume that people who speak with an accent (particularly an accent that is denigrated or associated with a class of people widely considered to be uneducated or shallow) do so out of simple ignorance and that their deviations from standard pronunciation are merely errors. Starting from this assumption, it becomes very tempting to try to represent the accent by simply spelling words incorrectly. Bad spelling = bad writing = bad speech = regional accent. Job done. Obviously I don’t actually think like that on a conscious level, but linguistic prejudice is a deeply ingrained part of my culture, and it took me a couple of passes of the text to weed out all of the examples of what I came to think of as the “wrong = wrong” school of accent transcription.
For example, Darian would almost certainly pronounce the word “what” with a glottal-stop. Now the glottal-stop is actually a very common part of the English language, even Standard British English and even, in some contexts, Standard American English this edition of SMBC points out) but because our spelling system was inherited from the Phoenecians via the Ancient Greeks via the Romans, it isn’t easy to represent in print. For several drafts, I had Darian saying “wot” but eventually I realised that this was absurd. The standard spelling of the word “what” in no way reflects its modern pronunciation in pretty much any dialect (I understand that it’s a holdover from the Anglo-Saxon “Hwæt” in which the “h” would have been sounded and the “æ” would have been pronounced as the short “a” in “cat”). Conversely the “wot” spelling reflects modern received pronunciation perfectly (or at least as perfectly as can be given the English language’s notoriously non-phonetic spelling system). The “wot” spelling didn’t convey any information at all about the way Darian’s accent actually sounded. It just indicated that Darian was uneducated (because “wrong” spelling means “wrong” speaking means “wrong” accent). So I went back to the standard spelling.
Obviously there were some things I did keep. I kept “f” for “th” in a number of places because it’s quite iconic of the accent – it’s also quite a deprecated pronunciation. I remember a discussion with a group of colleagues over lunch in which they expressed – in the same conversation – their outrage at a Yorkshire headmaster who had tried to teach his students to pronounce the word “bath” with a long “a” and their despair at parents in Essex who teach their children to pronounce the word “Thursday” with an initial “f”.
I kept “ahwight” which again I thought was iconic, and as much a dialect term as a variant spelling. I also kept “evva” for “ever” which, again, I felt was strangely important even though – like “wot” – the standard spelling doesn’t really reflect standard pronunciation. I think I thought “evva” and “nevva” were important because Darian uses them a lot when he’s talking about things which are important to him (things he’s “nevva” done or that are the best “evva”), and so I thought it grounded key elements of the dialogue in Darian’s voice and dialect without adding so much non-standard spelling as to be distracting.
This is probably a slightly spurious analogy, but I recently rewatched The Empire Strikes Back, and I was surprised at how straightforward Yoda’s speech is. Most of the things he says to Luke are actually in perfectly standard English, but the script gives him just enough variation to make his speech patterns distinctive so that, in retrospect, it feels like he every line in the wrong order delivered. I think I was aiming for something similar with Darian (although that isn’t to suggest that being from Essex is the same as being from Dagobah) – to use just enough non-standard vocabulary and spelling that it created a real sense of identity, while leaving the majority of his dialogue in completely standard English.
I have no idea if I actually succeeded – and ultimately that’s a call for the individual reader.