How do I know what language is period-appropriate?
I write fiction set in 18th-century England and America. Obviously, they speak English, and equally obviously, they speak it very differently than we do today. For example, I need to know which contractions were common, which were rarely used, and which were not in use yet.
How do I know how to get the language correct and accurate? What kind of resources and reference material will be helpful here?
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1 answer
Let's start with two basic observations:
All dialogue is artifice. People in Jane Austen's day did not speak like characters in a Jane Austen novel. Dialogue is not speech. Genuine transcribed speech is painful to read, almost inarticulate at times. Speech is a multimedia phenomenon. Dialogue has to achieve the same effect with just words, and is quite a different beast in consequence.
All novels are modern. We still read the very best novels of past centuries, but they were written for a different age and a different sensibility. A modern novel, even if set in the past, still needs to be a modern novel and appeal to modern sensibilities. This can include a certain degree of antiquarian interest, which drives a fair part of the historical fiction market, but the antiquarian feeling that such novels provide is, again, an artifice. Real life was not like that.
So, what you want is not dialog based on 18th century speech, both because dialogue is not speech and because what the modern reader of antiquarian tastes wants is something that sounds 18th century to them, which is different from actual 18th century speech (of which, by the way, we have no record or recording).
And happily, that is much easier to research. All you have to do is to read other modern novels set in the 18th century and emulate them.
One of the main issue with the dialogue of historical characters is that the genuine speech of that period would be difficult to follow and would sound very odd to the modern ear. That feeling of oddness, and the difficulty of understanding introduces a kind of oddness to the experience that is not really true to the period because no one in that time would have found any of it odd. You don't want the oddness of the speech to the modern ear to distract the reader and pull them out of the story, so you modernize their speech to a greater or lesser degree. At the same time, you want to avoid any obvious modernism, since that would be equally odd and distracting.
For these reasons, many historical novels seem to be written in what is closer to a timeless universal English, rather than a genuinely period English. And, again, they speak in dialogue, which is not the same thing as speech.
One interesting example, in which essentially modern speech patterns are sprinkled with just enough period vocabulary to be convincing without being offputting, are Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey Maturin series of sea novels, which are set at the beginning of the 19th century. Of course, the closer you get to the modern day, the easier this sort of thing becomes.
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