Writing dialogues for characters whose first language is not English

Similar questions have been asked in the past, for example How do I make an ESL character sound realistic? and How to write dialogue for someone who is intelligent but barely speaks the language? You might take a look at those.

Let me give you a different approach, however.

Unless the way the characters speak is an actual plot point, it is not unreasonable for people who know they are going to immigrate to a country to put some effort into learning the language in advance. If your characters have done so, their grammar might not in fact be broken. (Realistically, some particular mistakes would still be made, particularly where the language has some exception to the rules. But as a writer, you are free to ignore those.) Realistic language for such a scenario would include short simple sentences, simple words, no colloquialisms. They would have an accent, but this is one element that's better told than shown - it is rather tiresome, and sometimes hard, to read phonetically written accent for more than a line or two.

If your characters have taken language lessons in advance, their real struggle would be with understanding what is being said to them: their teacher would have been talking slowly, and would have either had a local accent, or spoken something close to R.P., whereas upon arrival, they'd be hearing people talking fast, enunciating poorly, and having all kinds of weird accents (Newcastle comes to mind). But that too is something you can gloss over in your writing, if you wish. It might be that because they have an accent and look like foreigners, people make an effort to talk slowly to them. (In fact, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, there's a scene with a character talking to the MC slowly, using very simple phrases, when the MC in fact is a professor of Spanish Language. It's just his appearance that marks him as a stranger.)

Dialogue with severe grammatical mistakes is not offensive (usually), but it gets tiresome very quickly. It doesn't flow, the reader has to struggle through it. If there is any way for you to avoid using more than a few lines of it, try to do so.

posted about 5 years ago

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Galastel‭

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Is there any chance you can work/volunteer at an ESL tutoring center or writing center, especially at a community college? That's a great way to see which errors people of different languages make.

I had a lot of Korean students, and their language lacks articles ("the" "a/an"), so they wouldn't see that they skipped them in English.

Also English has a lot of redundancies, and they hated including them as much as I hate using a double-negative as an intensifier (which Russian does, as well as many dialects of English).

posted about 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

April Salutes Monica C.‭

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