04.25.08

Idiolects

Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 09:53 by Jonas

I generally consider myself pretty proficient at reading and writing the English language. I put this down to a heavy exposure to English TV, English games, English books (thanks, mum!), and lots of time spent on the English parts of the Internet (something about the Danish corner of the ‘net seems oddly restricted and… rural to me, I can’t quite explain it - everything Danish on the ‘net just seems a bit pedestrian). It’s gotten to the point where my vocabulary contains words that many native English-speakers do not know, and where I certainly spell better than many of them - though it may simply be due to the fact that I care.

There is, however, one area in which I am always at a disadvantage and may always remain so: Idiolects. This is a frighteningly important part of writing, especially in English, which is a language distributed across several nations. A person’s idiolect describes so much about them, things we may or may not consciously pick up on, but which at least a native speaker will almost always understand at a subconscious level. From the way a person speaks (inflection, choice of words, and other factors), we infer their area of origin, their level of education, their social standing, and often even their ethnicity, among many other things. This is indescribably difficult to manage when you’re writing in anything other than your first language.

Yesterday, I experienced a good example. Working with voice actors is always a humbling experience for me because it provides constant reminders of the weaknesses of my English skills - for one, approximately 98% of my use of the language is in writing, and this shows. Oh brother, does it show! It’s also supremely enlightening, however, because I always learn new nuances of the language. Lawrence and I had met up on Skype with one of our best and most professional voice actors, Jeremiah, to overhear and direct his recording of one of our absolutely biggest characters: Scara B. King, Big Bad Evil Guy™. Scara has well over 300 lines, and the script we sent Jeremiah took up 39 pages. Yet, since Jeremiah is a top-professional fellow and we were able to direct his efforts in real-time, we somehow managed to record all these lines in 3½ hours to everybody’s general amazement.

At some point, Jeremiah came across a rather annoyed line saying simply “For fuck’s sake!” and objected: Scara isn’t Scottish!

This caught both Larry and me by surprise, since the phrase apparently sees use in Canada (where Larry is from) and I just had no idea it was a locally specific saying. Thankfully Gelo was present at that point, so he could confirm that indeed “For fuck’s sake” is not a term they use in the US. You learn something every day, I guess, but this serves to highlight my biggest problem: I want to be able to write in English on a professional level, and when even native English-speakers can be taken aback by the language-differences between various English-speaking nations, how am I supposed to ever fully master such nuances of the language?

The good writer knows how to use the language to define and describe his characters. This is especially important in screenwriting, where the audience will never have the chance to read thorough descriptions of the characters, so the lines themselves are incredibly important in building personality and attitude. Incidentally, game writing is usually a lot closer to screenwriting than novel-writing in that regard. If you want to be a really good writer (and it just so happens I do), you have to understand how different people use the language differently and reflect that in your characters.

Smike once suggested, in an effort to make me think about how I was writing Scara, that some of Scara’s lines make him out to probably be from somewhere around Boston. I could do nothing but accept his evaluation, but I have no idea what to do with the information. Even if I decided one of my characters would be from Boston, I would be very very hard pressed to write him in a way that sets him apart from eg. a New Yorker. My grasp of the English language, however impressive for a foreigner, just doesn’t extend that far.

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