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Topic : Re: Using colloquialisms the reader may not be familiar with I'm from Ireland, most of my stories take place in Ireland, and many of my characters will speak with Irish accents and/or dialects to - selfpublishingguru.com

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The answer to this depends very much on your audience AND your aims. If you are writing primarily for the narrow audience that shares your cultural context, use as much dialect as you want. If you are writing for a wide general audience, use dialect sparingly, and either add context, or use it in places where context will make it clear.

These are not, however, the only options. James Joyce wrote Finnegan's Wake entirely in an invented dialect that is incomprehensible to everyone, especially if they don't share Joyce's Irish background. His goal, presumably, was to challenge the audience. It is still considered an important and closely studied book, even though few people have ever actually read it. Similarly, Zora Neale Hurston deliberately wrote in frequently in dialect, knowing that much of her audience would find it challenging. It was a political as well as an aesthetic statement, expressing the value, worth and beauty of African-American dialect speech, and an implicit interrogation of the convention that African Americans must conform to mainstream English, but never the other way around. Both Joyce and Hurston, however, were geniuses with well-established reputations --this isn't an easy thing to pull off.

A hundred or so years ago, the reading public had a seemingly endless appetite for works written wholly in dialect, usually for humorous effect, but those days are long gone, and the work did NOT hold up well. On the other hand, a more recent work that deployed dialect sparingly, but to good effect, was Angela's Ashes --it might be a good model to look up. As a side note, the usual convention is that characters use dialect, the narrator does not, unless written in the first person. This can be broken, but not without encountering stiff resistance.


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