My WIP is set in South Yorkshire and one of the characters has a pretty strong regional accent - she has to, in order for it to be realistic. My problem is how to get that across in print.
I'm obviously not going to do any of that phonetically spelled crap ('oop north' etc) because a)I'm not Ben Elton and b)in my head that's how everyone talks anyway. The accent would be a given, I guess. The more difficult bit is that nobody in Doncaster uses the word 'the' if they can possibly help it. It would be realistic I suppose to just omit it, but it looks weird, and also a bit embarrassing - almost like the 'oop north' thing. And putting t' in front of words seems a bit patronising and comical and too much of a stereotype.
Should I just leave in the 'the' and hope people can ignore it - it's unrealistic that she'd say it, but the way people talk in books is always slightly unrealistic anyway, otherwise it would be unreadable.
Oh dear. Help.

I would leave the The out if that's authentic to the dialect and rhythm, especially since it's the king of thing which gets people 'hearing' the accent without fancy spellings and all. It's easy to get horribly self-conscious about things like this, and I bet it's fine. Why not upload a bit and see what people say?

Emma

Hello Catcrag,

I reckon Elmore Leonard gets this right in his 'Ten Rules of Writing,' suggesting that to 'use regional dialect, patois, sparingly' is best. This doesn't, however, stop him spelling things 'phonetically' sometimes, but he keeps it to a minimum. He'll have someone saying eyetalians and pe-cans, for example, but rarely pushes it too far. But he always makes sure he gets the patterns and the rhythms of their speech right, the interjections, the fillers etc. And, importantly, he doesn't hold back if they are likely to come out with an obscenity. His idea is, I suppose, that you should sound as authentic as possible but remember that attempts to sound too close to the real thing can get in the way of telling the story, and really gong for it big time can sound too much like the author being too clever, which is likely to also get in the way of telling the story. Like when a method actor mumbles his way through a script and sounds both incomprehensible and self-indulgent.

Gerry.

I would leave out "the", Catcrag and make that the only nod you make to the accent. You can then sprinkle it with the odd colloquialism and dialect word and the reader will start reading the accent in their heads. I remember reading a novel where the main character said very little but whenever she said okay it was always represented as "k". Took a while to get it but it worked as it showed something of her character, I think - her youth and her reticence.

It occurred to me while I was having lunch that it was very unlikely that such a frequently used word as 'the' would be entirely dropped from speech even if that was how it might sound. It's common in Yorkshire dialect to replace /t/ with a glottal sound, so it might sound a bit lost to some, but it's still there, although in a different form. And there are a lot of other phonetic changes that can happen depending on combinations of sounds. This has led to people writing things like 't'oven' instead of 'the oven' to represent the way people from Yorkshire might say it. So, I think it would be a mistake to drop 'the' because it may not have 'disappeared' at all. Of course, I don't know about the Doncaster dialect, but I still think it very unlikely that 'the' would be missed out entirely. For example, you might have someone say 'on t'floor' for 'on the floor'. And if you say that fast enough, the /t/ can sound different, certainly, but not completely lost. It just sounds different. I'm sure what I've just said doesn't help at all.

Gerry, I got the impression that Catcrag wants to avoid the apostrophe t thing. For a start there are so many "the-s" in a piece of writing you'd spend forever doing it. As a Lancastrian ( I know, I apologise) I used to get very annoyed reading the approximated version you suggest - on't floor. It's no nearer the right pronunciation as leaving 'the' out entirely, because the 't' doesn't suggest the glottalstop. And if a vowel sound follows "the" in a Lancashire accent then it's not "in't oven" but "in thoven." I'd say write it like that and make these bloody RP speakers and southerners do a bit of work to understand what they're reading for a change.

Fair enough. But I certainly wasn't suggesting that 't or 't were used. I was simply making the point that to suggest there is an absence when there actually isn't one might not be the best course of action. But I don't have a complete answer.

Thanks everyone - I know that the 'the' is still there, after a fashion, but I agree with Jem that I don't like the going to t'pub on t'bus thing because it doesn't actually sound like that. And also it has connotations of a comedy northern accent, which I'm trying to avoid. I might try an extract with no 'the', an extract with t'etc and one with the 'the' left in, and see which seems better.
Thanks again.

OK. Sorry I've not been much help. It's tricky this one, for all the reasons you say. But I still think that leaving it out is likely to seem very odd, mainly because it really is there and because it's used so much - it's by far the most used word in English. I've taught TEFL, and when you come across students who don't quite have the equivalent of 'the' in their native language, it really shows up when they fail to use it, especially when they write.

Anyway, all the best of luck with the writing. Let us know how it goes.

when you come across students who don't quite have the equivalent of 'the' in their native language, it really shows up when they fail to use it,

Yes, reading this thread I was thinking of all the Slavic-speakers, where their English can be amazingly good, and still they don't use articles because they just don't have the conceptual space for them. Which is very different from the glottal, almost-gone 't of some English dialects.

We don't have a sign for the glottal stop, unfortunately - it crops up in a lot of accents, after all, including London.

Emma

From what I can remember from studying this stuff, there are symbols available, but none of them in common use. Having said that, I think a question mark can be used to indicate it, and in fact is used in at least one system of transcription. Maybe someone should make one up. Anyhow, I still think leaving out 'the' would simply look strange and may not achieve the purpose of trying to imitate a way of speaking, unless they were a Czech, say, speaking English, which is how missing it out might make the speaker sound.

I think it's a question mark with no stop below it. But you can't really be phonetically transcribing speech in a story, can you? It would be a challenge!

<Added>

I'm feeling very brilliant now because I appear to know something Emma doesn't. This has got to be a first for me.

I think it could work if you weren't too slavish about it. I mean religiously leaving out every "the" isn't really necessary, all you want to do is connote the speech patterns.

I reckon a few missed "the"s and a few dialect words and keeping your ear tuned to the rhythm of the speech you're trying to reproduce is all you need.

There's one Irish writer I really like, and he barely makes any concessions to an Irish accent in his work, let alone an Oirish accent. He hardly ever uses a dialect word, and never makes any changes to the spelling to connote an Irish accent. And yet somehow whenever I read his dialect, I just "hear" it in an Irish accent. I can't put my finger on what makes it Irish, it's just something about the rhythm and the phraseology.

So I think less is more, and trust your reader.

<Added>

I should say there's more than one Irish writer I like! Just this guy seems to do it well

You're right - it came back to me when I was watching the telly. But I think I have seen the question mark used to indicate it sometimes. I've got a feeling that I maybe saw it in a play script or something - George Bernard Shaw maybe. He had some notions about this type of thing, didn't he? Whoever it was, it didn't catch on. And it won't, I should think.

Anyhow, that was a lively debate we were having this afternoon. Believe it or not, I've never had an online chat with people this way before. Honestly. It's slightly surreal.

Yep. That all sounds good to me. And it sounds like Elmore Leonard's advice too.