Does this sound right or a bit ''Otherising?''

The following passage is from Street Thieves And Artful Dodgers, which is inspired by ''Oliver Twist". The story is written in the form of Dodger's diary, and I intend for the narrative voice to be a mix of Standard English and African American dialect. Can anyone tell me if this solves the "Otherising" issue? Does Dodger sound like a street kid from NYC?

Does it sound right or is the dialect excessive or even a bit forced? Is it accurate? I'm reading it right now and wondering whether I should tone it down.

edited 29th Aug '13 7:12:31 AM by morwenedhelwen

You should definitely tone it down. The grammar mistakes don't really sound authentic at all, and 'be callin me' sounds particularly American rather than Cockney.

@Jimmy: It's set in a retro-future version of Five Points, a district of New York, not in London. So the dialect's supposed to be (African) American rather than English.

Why does everyone always assume ''Oliver Twist inspired/Oliver Twist adaptation=London"? There have been American-set versions since the early 1900s when the first few silent movies of the story were made. Yet the default assumption seems to be London and Cockney accents even though it doesn't have to have the same setting as the book or musical. Making it so that Fagin isn't the only adult at his house should be a clue about how this isn't really an adaptation of Oliver Twist.

(Sorry if I sound angry, it's just that I've noticed the London thing around, and I'm puzzled by that).

edited 29th Aug '13 4:09:33 PM by morwenedhelwen

It's quite difficult to read. I wouldn't fight my way through more than a few pages before setting it down with no intent to ever pick it back up again.

Yeah, I'll second what Maddy said.

Thanks everyone. OK, why does everyone assume that something inspired by Oliver Twist will be set in London?

Because Oliver Twist was set in London. I think that's all there is to it; like how people expect action films to happen in places like LA.

I suppose that the default assumption is "Like Source Unless Noted"; if the source is set in London, and nothing indicates another setting, it seems reasonable to start with the assumption that we're in London.

You did, admittedly, mention that it's set in New York, but that may easily have been missed. Other adaptations may have had the benefit of either scenery or further prose to point out that the setting is somewhere other than London.

edited 29th Aug '13 7:03:03 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

@Thaumaturgis: Most of the New York-set stories which are explicitly adaptations of OT are movies.

edited 29th Aug '13 9:13:33 PM by morwenedhelwen

his way of talking sounds very artificial and seems forced. and i can't help at all since i'm not a native english speaker. but trying to make it sound like actual, brief thoughts would be a start. either go full nigga bitch gangsta speak or some white cracker jargon if he does live in the slums and would speak that way.

also, don't think too hard on the london stuff. i guess that's why his dialogue seemed forced. you're trying to fit him into a stereotype, which you don't seem to know much about of.

edited 29th Aug '13 11:33:55 PM by ShanghaiSlave

What stereotype are you talking about? I know plenty about the ways street kids lived in the 19th century.

edited 29th Aug '13 11:45:39 PM by morwenedhelwen

Isn't this set in a not-real-world New York? Why even bother to try to get a 'real' dialect when you can just use more-or-less grammatically correct English? Acceptable Breaks from Reality.

as i've said, i'm not an english speaker, so I have no idea what word i'm looking for. but basically, he doesn't speak like an actual person at all, more like a robot trying to pass as human by mixing two dialects while speaking unnaturally.

For the same reasons people use "Victorian Cockney" when they write steampunk set in England during Queen Victoria's reign.

And IIRC Ebonics/African American English is a dialect, not just "grammatically incorrect English."

@Shanghai: OK, I know I'm not an expert. I don't want to have this sound forced, but I also don't want to make it OTT or have a stereotyped character (although you could argue that "Artful Dodger" types are stereotypes).

Would it work better if for example it was written in Standard Englsih with certain word choices and sentence structure that reflect the other dialect?

edited 30th Aug '13 12:06:24 AM by morwenedhelwen

I didn't say it was grammatically incorrect, my point was you could use standard grammar you'd find in an average English textbook and it probably wouldn't seem out of place. I probably expressed the point poorly.

As a reader my experience is people who are familiar with London's dialects write Cockney well, people familiar with US dialects write those well, people in other countries can't pull it off. If I found a book by a born-and-bred Canadian written in Cockney I'd probably put it straight back on the shelf - just my own judgement.

@editer: I am familiar, though, with the way the dialect sounded in the 19th century, but not that familiar with the way it sounds now.

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edited 30th Aug '13 1:07:57 AM by morwenedhelwen

When I said familiar I meant like an English person familiar with Cockney accent as part of their living experience at some point. For example Terry Pratchett's fictional city Ankh Morpork is very much influenced by London and New York. Pratchett could have tried US accents, but he does the class-based differences in England accents very well to create a sense of the setting. He writes these well because they are from people he met in real life.

In contrast, someone like Rowling pretty much just writes all dialogue in very plain and average English and that works fine too.

Except for Hagrid...

Yeah except for Hagrid and the foreigners.

So how do you think I should handle this? I'd ideally like to use the dialect.

1. Take a trip to New York City (but a short trip isn't going to tell you much)

2. Eventually go to live in NYC for a few years and rent a cheap house. (Implausible right now).

3. Use a style which reflects the dialect.

edited 30th Aug '13 2:27:05 AM by morwenedhelwen

Anyone have ideas on how I could get the dialect aspect to work? In fact, anyone want to give me pointers on this?

edited 30th Aug '13 5:42:53 AM by morwenedhelwen

If using the visual dialect is important to you, change away from first-person narration and restrict the dialect to dialogue.

But it's still going to be difficult to read large chunks of it.

Do you mean writing the diary entries in Standard English and writing dialect for the dialogue? FWIW the dialogue's not going to be all in dialect. There'll be codeswitching to Standard English whenever the central characters are talking to people who speak Standard English.