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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/37394
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/37394
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Following [this](https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/37336/too-modern-words) question, I'm struggling with writing the speech of pre-modern (in my case - 5th century) noble-born children among themselves.

Characters who are well-educated would not be making grammatical mistakes and would not be mispronouncing words (in fact, you can expect them to speak the local version of "Received Pronunciation"). They wouldn't use "Ain't", for example.

At the same time, children speaking among themselves, (as opposed to speaking to an adult,) would hardly use structured literary sentences - they would use colloquial speech.

Trouble is, **colloquialisms can easily be timed and localised** - they belong to a specific time (a specific century, or even a specific decade), and to a specific place. Thus, they create a jarring effect when used in a work set in an earlier time and a different place (as discussed in the question mentioned above). And of course, I have no access to colloquialisms of the period I'm writing about.

How, then, do I solve this conundrum - **how do I write colloquial speech, without jarring too-modern colloquialisms?** And while we're about it, what about the uneducated farmer in the same setting? Particular mispronunciations and grammatical errors are also period-specific and location-specific. How do I mark a person as a "poor farmer" without also marking him as being a "poor farmer from 1900s Northern England", for example?

Original score: 10