Differentiate Minds Before Accents

“Heads, heads—take care of your heads!” shouts a stranger in a coach-yard at Mr. Pickwick’s party, in the second chapter of The Pickwick Papers. Then he explains the danger. “Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother’s head off.” Dickens marks no dialect here and spells nothing phonetically, and you can tell the man by grammar alone. His explanation has no subordinate clauses and no “because.” He lays the facts beside one another like cards. Mr. Pickwick, answering, speaks in complete, composed sentences (“I am ruminating on the strange mutability of human affairs”).

The stranger is Jingle, and his grammar proves to be a tool. Later he works the same clipped manner on a spinster aunt, saying “lovely creature—sacrificed at the shrine—heartless avarice” and then arriving at the point: Mr. Tupman, he says, only wants her money. The broken syntax lets him pass from lament to slander without a joining clause that she could question.

Jingle has no accent at all. What separates him from Pickwick is how a mind connects things, whether it subordinates or stacks, finishes sentences or abandons them, along with what it takes for granted and where it steers a conversation. Our reasoning for putting these first is that readers infer a mind from those things, and that the inference holds across a whole scene, where a spelling tic is noticed once and then fades.

Accent isn’t ruled out. Bernard Shaw, in a stage direction in Pygmalion, spells out a flower girl’s speech for a few lines and then apologizes that “this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London,” in a play whose hero is a phonetician. Spelling lets the reader hear a place and makes the reader decode word by word. It is also bound up with who is allowed to be heard on the page. Zora Neale Hurston studied anthropology at Barnard under Franz Boas and brought that training to the vernacular she wrote. Her account of Cudjo Lewis, completed in 1931, was published only in 2018, as Barracoon, and dialect was a sticking point: in the fall of 1931 she wrote to her patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, that Viking “again asks for the Life of Kossula, but in language rather than dialect.”

A writer who knows a speech community and has a reason can render it with respect, and accent alone can still turn a person into a type. A workable course is to build the mind first and then add the smallest touch of sound the character needs (a word order, a few chosen words) before reaching for spelling.

Practice. Choose two characters in conflict and write a four-line speech sheet for each: average sentence length; whether they ask or state; one thing they never say; one thing they assume everyone knows. Then write twelve lines of dialogue between them, with no names, no tags, and no catchphrases, and keep the whole exercise to forty-five minutes. Give the page to a reader, or leave it for a day and read it cold, and label each line A or B. Chance alone would give about six right; ten or more out of twelve is a fair sign the minds are distinct. Revise the misses by altering the syntax or the assumption, not by adding a tic. If the misses cluster on one character, that character is probably still talking like you.