noise."Writing Mechanics 2: Vernacular and Speech Patterns · 12:27am Feb 1st, 2018
It's been three years since I last attempted to give writing advice. Now that I've had time to lick my wounds, here we go again!
First off, we need to be a little bit pedantic here. According to Dictionary.com, vernacular means expressed or written in the native language of a place, as literary works, and I'm going to be applying it to much, much more.
But, luckily I did some further looking (because I'd feel like a fool to have some highfalutin blog post about writing and get the subject completely wrong), and . . .
A vernacular or vernacular language is the native language or native dialect (usually colloquial or informal) of a specific population, especially as distinguished from a literary, national or standard variety of the language, or a lingua franca (also called a vehicular language) used in the region or state inhabited by that population. Some linguists use "vernacular" and "nonstandard dialect" as synonyms.
—wikipedia
So we're gonna go with using 'vernacular' and 'nonstandard dialect' as synonyms, even though I'm not technically a linguist.
I kinda touched on this a bit way back when I was blogging about saidisms, but here's a quick refresher.
“Well, Ah dunno about that, sugarcube.”
“Darling, it will be fine.”
“Let's rush in without thinking.”
“Um, if that's alright with you.”
I should presume that all of my readers could correctly identify the pony who said each thing above—all of the Mane 6 have their own particular speech patterns. And in fact, if all you ever want to write about is the Mane 6, their speech patterns are well-established, and somebody's probably already done a far better job of blogging about it than I have.
On the other hand, if you're partial to background characters or even OCs (gasp!), buckle up.
Technically, in the above four examples, only one is in vernacular, and that's Applejack's line. [Well, maybe Fluttershy's as well, depending on if you think alright is an actual word or not. gDocs isn't saying that it isn't, but then again I've trained gDocs to understand that anypony is a real word, so. . . .]
People have different opinions of vernacular, there's no question about that, and it gets tricky in fanfiction especially. Anyone who is familiar enough with the show to have correctly identified Applejack's line above would almost certainly have still read it in her voice if I'd said “Well, I don't know about that, sugarcube.”
If you've got a different character with a southern accent, though, how do you represent it in your story? You could just outright say it when you first introduce the character:
“How are you doing tonight?” she asked in a soft southern drawl. is perfectly acceptable; nobody is going to find fault with that. But:
“How are y'all doin' tonight?” she asked in a soft southern drawl. is better, IMHO. And
“How are y'all doin' tonight?” she asked. is even more better. You save on words in the dialogue tag, and as long as you're doing it consistently, you can eliminate many of the dialogue tags, plus you don't have to keep reminding the reader that she has a southern drawl. This second thing is probably well worth considering for anyone who publishes stories here or elsewhere serially, because in the days, weeks, or months since the last update some of the readers are likely to forget that she has a southern accent.
From the ant-sized Wiki
Vernacular can also tell you other things about the character. With the southern accent, it would imply that the character had moved from somewhere else (assuming that the story isn't set in the south where everybody talks like that).
I don't know if this is a thing that you younger kids will remember, but back in my day, there was the Valley Girl vernacular. “It was, like, so awesome!” And there's no need to limit yourself; there are plenty of other filler words that you can use for different things.
“It was, um, about this big,” he said. “Maybe, I dunno, a mile away?”
“So there I was, right? Standing up on the edge of a cliff, okay? And behind me, I can hear the thunder of buffalo hooves.”
“The thing about that—and this is what kills me—is every news channel is nothing but fake news. There ought to be a law.”
All of those little speech patterns are more effective when frequently used by a character, of course; just once they don't really stand out, but as they're repeated, you add another layer of authenticity to the character.
And I'm willing to bet from those little snippets you got a brief image of the character in your mind.
Or maybe not. Maybe you don't believe me, so we're going to do a comparative example:
“Nopony tells me nothing,” she groused. Her muzzle wrinkled as she looked back down at the collection of photographs spread across the table.
Suddenly, her ears perked, and she pushed a couple of photographs out of the collection. “There! Them are the ones!”
With me so far? Now for take two:
“Nopony has told me anything,” she groused. Her muzzle wrinkled as she looked back down at the collection of photographs spread across the table.
Suddenly, her ears perked, and she pushed a couple of photographs out of the collection. “Those two—they are the ruffians.”
Thus far, I've only talked about dialogue, since of course that's when you'd usually use vernacular. However, in a first-person story, it's absolutely reasonable to have the entire story written in vernacular. The story is putatively being told from the viewpoint of an actual person (or pony) after all, and thus their manner of speaking can be used for the entire narrative.
Silver Glow's Journal is an example of this. For those of you who didn't read it, it was written as a journal and very much in Silver Glow's voice.
There was a brief moment of awkwardness, like neither of us could believe this was actually happening, and then I reached out my hoof like we'd been told was a greeting (just like a hoofshake but the human will hold onto your hoof or pastern) and she leaned over and wrapped her arms around me and gave me a hug.
I told her that if I'd known we were going to be hugging I would have stood up on my hind legs, and so we tried again and it worked out much better.
She took off her coat and pulled her suitcase which has little wheels into the room and then we introduced ourselves properly.
Going outside of fanfic, the first example that springs to mind is Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange.
“What's it going to be then, eh?”
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither.
Some of y'all have seen the movie, I'm sure, and fewer have read the book. Hold that thought, 'cause next we're going to talk about the two disadvantages to vernacular.
The first, and most obvious, is that you're going to turn off a reader. This is especially true of whole stories written in vernacular; a reader might decide it's just not worth the bother to figure it out (and I'll be honest, I had a really hard time getting into A Clockwork Orange, although once I was about a chapter in, it started making sense to me). You're also going to have to find some way of explaining the important plot elements that the casual reader might miss. And I did have some readers start reading Silver Glow's Journal and quit because they didn't like the writing style, or assumed that I didn't know how to write properly (I know this, because some of them commented to that effect).
For simply dialogue, it becomes somewhat easier, but only somewhat. If it's close to conventional English (or whatever your native language is) and it's simple things it's really no bother at all. If you're going for more exotic, though, sometimes it becomes a chore to write that particular character, and what can happen is that you lose interest in writing any dialogue for that character.
Let's say, for example, that I want an ultra-realistic not-very-good English speaker, and I decide that I want him to be a native Russian speaker. To do it right, I have to be familiar enough with how the Russian language works to consistently have him make the same kind of mistakes that a real Russian speaker would, and I have to do this every time that I want him to speak.
This is easy if I have a Russian friend who doesn't speak English all that well, because I can mimic what he does without knowing exactly why.
The second and somewhat less obvious drawback is that some words are weird to write out. Sure, most of us can wrap our heads around Applejack saying Ah instead of I, and a lot of other simple vernacular like gonna or coulda are simple enough, but if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, consider this:
“We couldn't've gone any faster if we'd tried.”
Or how about this:
“If y'all'd've driven quicker. . . .”
Besides just the weird contractions, some people do have weird vocal tics where they mispronounce a certain word, and that's something that you can put in dialogue. One of my friends always pronounced breakfast as breakfirst, and when I was a kid, I called spaghetti bisketti.
There are also other various other speech defects (for lack of a better word) that can be written out, such as stutters and lisps; those also come with their own sets of potential drawbacks. A couple that come to mind quite quickly are Bill's stutter in It, and Tom Cullen from The Stand who frequently says “M-O-O-N, that spells ____________.”
Incidentally, here I was going to quote from It, but I can't find my copy. It's somewhere in the 1200 or so trade paperbacks I have, but I don't know where. 
Luckily, like many authors, King is in some ways a one trick pony, and I did find another example of a character stuttering:
“Do you think that pile of shit was at Normandy?”
Teddy shook his head violently. “Nuh-Nuh-No!”
“Do you think that guy knows you?”
“Nuh-No! No, b-b-but—”
“Or your father? He one of your father's buddies?”
“NO!” Angry, horrified. The thought. Teddy's chest heaved and more sobs came out of it.
The Body, Stephen King
For those of you who are on the fence still (and I'm sure that there are some), I ought to mention that when I was thinking of vernacular and this particular blog post, several characters and stories came to mind quite quickly, because they were memorable characters. Of course, I can't say that just having their dialogue in vernacular is what made them memorable; but it didn't hurt.
So now we get to the touchy points of one of these blog posts: you've read along and found yourself nodding your head, and you want to do this in your next story, and I suppose you're expecting some wonderful advice from me, especially after about 2,000 words of me rambling on.
Thing is—and this always sounds sketchy when I actually have to put it in writing—the best way to do it is find some author who does it well, and copy.
Now, obviously I don't mean plagiarize. That's bad. Don't plan on having a good Southern character and decide to just lift lines from The Adventures of Huck Finn. But by all means, read it. Figure out how Mark Twain did it, where there are words that tripped you up and whether or not Twain bothered to explain what the character meant, or if you could figure it out by context, or if you had to get a dictionary and look up the word. Decide before it's too late if that's going to turn into a complete pain to write, or if it's something that you can mimic.
Read lines aloud, or even say them before you write them down. In one of my Sam and Rose stories, I actually held a bottle in my mouth and talked around it to see how that would sound, because that's what the character was doing.
Most importantly of all, practice. You probably won't get it right the first time, and that's okay.
When I was writing a story set sometime in the mid-late 1800s on a whaling boat in the arctic, I spent about two weeks binge-reading everything from around that period I could get my hands on. As it was an adventure-fantasy sort of thing I especially read lots and lots of Jack London. And it helped a ton! Reading stuff that's written the way you want to write is one of the best ways to learn how to write.
And it's part of a problem I see in fanfic, where people who are bad writers mostly read bad fanfic, and don't even have the least clue what they're doing wrong or why their stories suck. Then they go to writing groups full of other bad writers and ask for an editor, and get a bad editor, and nothing improves. People need to get their heads out of pony sometimes. Sure the best of pony is as good as the best of any writing anywhere, in my opinion, but if you're not already really good, you can mistake "popular" for "best" and learn some really bad habits. (And oh boy does that problem particularly show in clop. Bad clop phrasings are memetic, they spread like viruses from one bad writer to another.)
The most important thing I got out of this blog was that we need more Sam and Rose stories.
Vernacular and I have had a tumultuous relationship, especially with Applejack. Finding the sweet spot is a tricky thing, and it's not the same for every story. Great work in showing the strengths of doing it well. Still, to those reading this, bear in mind that done poorly, vernacular can do more to break reader immersion than enhance it.
"How y'all doin' tonight?" she asked. is bestest.
Great points about making sure you can stand to write the vernacular you've chosen. In my glacial editing pass I've been noticing that, while I haven't given any character anything extreme, I may have given myself too many differences in speech patterns. Alex has one, Arissa another, another doctor a third, and so on. Make sure you can keep your approaches straight!
4786534
What was Ember doing on a whaling boat in the arctic?
Ooh. Cool. That's useful.
For any of you who want more on this subject, check out Viking ZX's Being a Better Writer blogs linked below!
Accents!
Dialects!
Languages!
*cough*Zecora*cough*
I hate writing multiple contractions. But on rare occasion I do it anyway, because the situation calls for it. And that's that.
Ultimately - it's important to remember - as a writer, you're going to irk some readers no matter what you do. Because some people need/want to read Applejack saying 'I' as 'Ah,' otherwise it breaks their immersion, and some other people can't stand seeing the word 'Ah' in place of 'I' because it's just not right, and that breaks their immersion. The key is to write how you think it best delivers the story you're telling.
This is reallyg ood for if I ever get around to writing one day. It's the little stuff like this that really makes a difference.
that's still around, i've met people like that.
i've done neither. I probably should at some point.
4786534
Oh, yeah, totally. I read a bunch of Poe before writing a stupid comedy in his style--I can usually mimic an author or a style if I read a lot of similar stuff before I write my own take on it.
That's always a challenge. I've been really lucky, I think, in having a decent skillset from the getgo, and generally attracting good editors and pre-readers (mind you, I brought a fair bit of reading and writing experience to the table; that aforementioned Poe fic was written back in the 90s). But what does someone do who doesn't know that they're bad, and doesn't know anyone who will not only tell them that they suck, but more importantly why they suck?
I notice the same kind of thing in a lot of HiE stories, to be honest. It's probably also rampant in romances, but I generally don't read those.
4786555
It's been a while since the last one, hasn't it?
4786604
Applejack is tricky, and Red nails an important point in his comment: different readers expect to see it done different ways, so no matter what you do, you're probably going to turn off somebody.
Oh, absolutely. And it's not just with vernacular and character voice; choices like what person the story's told in changes the whole tone of the thing. Writing Silver Glow's Journal as a third person omniscient story would have had a very different feel, even if Silver Glow remained exactly the same.
That's always a danger . . . but then, anything else done poorly in a story can break reader immersion, so. . . .
4786703
One time when I was younger, my dad used the word 'penultimate' to refer to the second-to-last point on our journey. After that, we started modifying penultimate, winding up with things like semi-penultimate, pre-semi-penultimate, etc.
4786716
I got lucky figuring that out in an early (and incomplete) novel I wrote. I had one character speaking with a characteristic Scottish brogue, and it was so much work to write any of his lines, I just didn't give him any.
There's probably a good general rule for how many different speech patterns people should/will have, especially since people who live in the same area will generally tend to have very similar speech patterns (I've tended to switch depending on what company I'm with), plus it could potentially overload a reader trying to sort it all out. Or overload an author.
4786829
Oh, I should totally check those out. Viking ZX seems like the kind of dude who knows what he's talking about.
4786846
And literally her line in the comic with the deer, which makes me immensely happy.
Yeah, Zecora's a tough one. Last fic I had her in, I had Nightmare Moon stuff a ball gag in her mouth before she could rhyme more than one line.
I try to avoid them, too, but when you've gotta use them, you've gotta. I think there's at least one in Drive.
Honestly, any author who thinks he's going to write something that everybody will like is absolutely delusional. The best you can hope for is to make the story good enough so that people on the fence don't get turned off by one little thing, and stick around for the other things.
I kind of wanted to find a particular comment for this blog (but not badly enough to wade through several thousand)--somebody once said that the way I wrote Applejack made her sound like she was retarded (apparently he didn't like the vernacular, because IIRC, her lines were all the kind of sensible things you'd expect Applejack to say).
4787228
It's totally the little things.
I don't know if I should be happy or sad about that.
The book's hard to get into, just because of the vernacular, but it's totally worth it if you can. The movie's also good.
I saw the movie before I read the book, and honestly that might be the best way to approach it.
4787459
Actually, "antepenultimate" is in the common parlance.
Preantepenultimate is in dictionaries, but features less heavily in English light music.
4787470
well, it is toned down a bit in real life.
I'll have to keep that in mind.
4787508
I feel that we did use that one, too.
Which is quite a shame, really.
4787934
It's not the thing I'd normally recommend, but the language is so different in the book, I think it makes a real difference if you know what it sounds like beforehand.
Heh, reminds me of this one time in band . . . anyways, we were trying to play Overture from the Flying Dutchman, and nearly everybody was struggling because the time signature was so weird. Except me, because I knew what it was supposed to sound like.
One thing that I noticed on this topic, long ago, when I read the Harry Potter books, was the speech of the character of Hagrid, and its effects. He spoke in a vernacular way, but it got kinda ridiculous with the level it was at, which had the additional effect of making it seem like all the other character (except the foreigners, because no one except native English can speak the language without a broad accent), all speak the same. The scenes following the ones where Hagrid had been speaking a lot, there would be almost no passion to the characters' speech, them coming across as very stiff compared to Hagrid.
Vehicular is standard, while vernacular is non-standard but not alien?
Vehicles:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/401_Gridlock.jpg/1200px-401_Gridlock.jpg
And a... 'Vernecule'?:
careco.co.uk/csp/careco/mobility/products/400/MS02011_rascal_388_deluxe.jpg
Except that'd be a vehicle in Florida I guess.
4799093
I hadn't noticed that particularly; then again, it's been a long time since I read the books. Like, over a decade. When did the last one come out? 2005?
But that is a risk that you take using vernacular in a story, especially if it's only one character who uses it.
Uh, I think that's what the definition is saying. Also, I just now noticed that it says 'vehicular,' which strikes me as odd, so I did some more googling and that's what Google says a lingua franca is (the whole quote was cut and pasted, FWIW).
Really, for the purposes of this blog post, 'standard' is proper, grammatically correct dialogue that uses normal words, whereas vernacular is everything that isn't.
4799260
So gryphon-terms would be vernacular in Equestria? And also things like 'nobody'.
What is an 'armchair' in Equestria? 'Foreleg-chair'?
4799657
Arguably, yes. Along with some of Applejack's speech patterns. Although, I think if they get adopted into the standard lexicon, they're not vernacular anymore, regardless of origin. And there are varying terms when you're talking with an English Major; for our purposes of writing, it's just when you're writing things that aren't textbook English.
There are three schools of thought on that:
1. Yes.
2. Armchair is appropriate, because horses' forelegs are their arms.
3. Use some other term, to avoid getting in an argument with people from the 1 or 2 school of thought.
4800869
Is 'arm' an accepted term for a horse's foreleg? I hope it is, just in case I write a battle-sequence, as fun as it would be to have the NCOs shout "Soldiers, shoulder forelegs! Present Forelegs!"
Weird, that blog post never showed up in my feed. At least I don't remember it...
Neat though.
Speaking from experience, the first thing I can think from myself speaking english or from my non-native-french-speaker collegues speaking in french is vocabulary. The words are not comming easily and so we restrict ourselves to more simple words and sentence structures -usually- and sometime the word(s) we are looking for just don't come up. We know the word, we know we know it, but we can't recall it.
So If I had to write a non-native english speaker, I'd go with simple words and hesitations.
4801368
Depends on who you ask. Apparently, vet students get bitter about that. I've also heard a lot of horse people refer to hooves as 'feet.'
I'd personally stick to the more 'horse' description of forelegs and hooves, because of the audience that we're writing to here.
Do it!
4803074
Yeah, I think simplifying would be common when you don't really know the language all that well. It's actually something that happens a lot with the developmentally disabled adults that I work with, too--some of them have limited comprehension of English, and often don't bother with tenses or proper pronouns. So for example, one guy might say something like "Me go you," meaning that he wants to go with me.
4803360
Agreed. Horse-terms are cute. Hoofsie-woofsie nuzzley-muzzley
Yeah, I'm gonna try and keep that in mind in case I notice a spot where it's appropriate.
- Drill-sergeant: "Recruits! Present forelegs!"
- The recruits, confused, lies down on the ground and present all four of their legs.
4803766
i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/625/419/837.png
Just in case you haven't seen this.
"Better do what the sarge says. He gets all yelly if we don't."
4805187
Naaw. What happened to all those fics where a human snuggles a pony? I need some of those now. Ah well, some of them are worth rereading.
It's decided. This is gonna be a short-fic.
4805209
Hmm, human snuggles a pony. I haven't done that in a while. Maybe it's time for another one.
Huzzah!
4807556
I'd say so
It might be a bit insipid to base the whole joke on that. Any other good equestrian terms you can think of to incorporate into it? Do you have a good list of terms and what they mean?