A quick and pointless rant

[tree_and_leaf]

This is not aimed at anyone in particular, let alone anyone on my f-list; it's just been increasingly getting on my nerves.

Dear Who fanfic writers: we know that Rose has a fairly typical Estuary accent. I don't find it attractive, by any means, but it's not extreme, just normal for a girl of her origins, educational attainments, and class. Everyone who has seen the show, and probably lots of people who haven't know this. This accent, naturally, comes with a tendency to glottal stop and drop h's.

You do NOT need to make this visually obvious by always writing her dialogue with heavy use of apostrophe, like so: Wha'? 'Old on a momen'. It is annoying, exaggerated, and generally a pain to read.

Recently I found someone writing Nine, using exactly the same punctuation tricks, in order to indicate that he is OMG! Northern!

Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs.

Again, Nine's accent was not particaluarly heavy. It does not need constant attention drawn to it. If you want to show a character's linguistic background, there are better and subtler ways of doing it. But they aren't necessary for either Rose or Nine, because they don't speak a dialect. They speak standard English with a mild regional accent.

And if you aren't familiar with a dialect, for heaven's sake don't try to reproduce it. Getting it wrong is a million times more annoying than not doing it at all.

/rant.

Comments

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

It's a pity the dialectizer web page doesn't include "hopelessly old-fashioned upper class" (though I noted recently upon listening to a recording of Edward VIII's abdication that there was a definite Albert Square twang to his pronunication).

[tree_and_leaf]

It's funny how dialects drift, isn't it? I notice that the aspirated h in who, what etc seems to have gone everywhere except in Scots, although it used to be characteristic of educated speech generally.

This all shows, of course, why the sort of pronunciation based spelling recently championed by John Sutherland in the grauniad is doomed - because how could you ever pick one pronounciation?

(Don't know the dialectizer - link please?)

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Dialect/accent drift is fascinating. I remember my grandmother had a distinctly aspirated h - maybe we should start a low-level campaign to bring it back. I have a vain ambition to see a new production of the Wimsey books in which everyone has the correct accent, so Parker and Harriet are relatively innocuous with a few period markers, Helen sounds like a strangled cat, and Freddy Arbuthnot is almost incomprenensible. Peter might drift a bit depending on his interlocutor and situation.

As for phonetic spelling, naturally it would be based on "correct" pronunciation; that is, John Sutherland's.

Dialectizer is at http://rinkworks.com/dialect/ I like the Swedish chef.

[tree_and_leaf]

Thanks! That's a lot of fun.

As a Scot, I do the aspirated h automatically, although otherwise I don't have much of a regional accent.