DIALECT

After years of thinking about it, I am now starting to write about “what I know,” as the well-worn injunction to new writers goes.  So, I have lived in the American South my entire life, most of it in rural areas or small towns nestled in rural areas.  I have been surrounded by “bubbas” most of my life, and I can emulate their persistent, shared “dialect” pretty closely, I think.

For example:

“I told you not to come in this house with your muddy shoes!”

Becomes:

“I done tol’ y’all don’ be comin’ in dis heah house wit’ yaw muddy shoes!

However, even though those folks may SOUND like that, they don’t necessarily hear THEMSELVES like that!  None of us do!  What we likely think and hear is the first version, even though we may sound like the second version!  It reminds me of the fatuously persistent question of whether we dream in black-and-white or color!  When I dream, I am not at all conscious of “color” (unless the dream is somehow ABOUT color).  Most dreams are like experiences of reality, which in my opinion has no color!  It is an irrelevant quality of those realities!  I don’t usually even notice color in my day-to-day stroll through reality unless I am specifically looking for it.

Therefore, I think it is pretentious and vain to try to write in dialect.  And, therefore, I am going to avoid doing that.  I decided to try to write in “proper” English and let the reader imagine whatever dialect (s)he wishes!  I watched a lot of TV as a child, and I remember the first time I heard a Southerner being interviewed on TV, and how odd their accent sounded.  I had become inured to the accents of trained TV personnel who sounded “normal,” in contrast to the Southern “rubes” being interviewed!  

Yet, those “rubes” sounded exactly as I do!  I have been told I have a pronounced “Southern” accent, despite having a law doctorate.  I well remember the CBS-TV legal reporter Fred Graham, who had a pronounced “Southern” accent, and how quaint it sounded, though he was very knowledgeable and obviously well-accomplished.  Graham, born in Little Rock, Arkansas and a graduate of Yale, Vanderbilt law school, and Oxford, died at age 88 in December of 2019 from the horrors of Parkinson’s Disease.  He had been very good at his craft, nor did he speak in dialect!

I am not going to start dreaming in Technicolor ® either!