Talkin’ Tennessee-un

          A quick lesson in Tennessee dialect:

The spoken word                                    What it actually means

             far                                                              fire

             fat                                                              fight

             tar                                                              tire
             yawl                                                           you all

             brat                                                            bright
             wah?                                                          why?

             hail no                                                        hell no

             lay-us gnat                                                 last night

             wail owl rat                                               well all right

             yeeeeeeee-haw                                        this experience is quite enjoyable (useful for

                                                                              everything from eating fried pork skins to making love)

        

          And so on.  After a few days in Knoxville or Nashville, you can learn enough to  understand restaurant specials and converse with the locals a bit.  After that, hopefully, your drive home will be long enough to shed all the words you've recently learned and return to normal speech.  If there be such a thing.

          There are some two dozen distinct major English dialects recognized in the United States.  Some cover a broad area, like the Southern Appalachian voice that includes Tennessee-tawk.  Some are only used in restricted areas, like San Francisco Urban, New York Urban, Boston Urban, and the extra-hard-to-understand Gullah of the Charleston area.  One I like, especially when used in singing, is Louisiana Cajun.  Near where I live there’s a dialect peculiar to only modest-sized Harkers Island, preserving remnants of the old Elizabethan tongue (high tide to them is “hoi toide”).

          Using dialect and foreign-language accents in writing dialog can be a challenge.   If you try to portray a hillbilly speaking, for example, and you replace the g on all words ending in “ing” with an apostrophe, you could soon have a page swimming with tadpole-like apostrophes, only confusing and slowing readers.  The late Elmore Leonard solved this by not using any apostrophes at all, simply spelling out dialect words semi-phonetically (but still recognizably).

          The best advice I’ve heard is to use dialect words sparingly in the first place, then go back during the final self-editing and cull out even more of them.

          In conveying dialect and foreign accents, the merest hint is almost always quite enough.

Phil