: Re: How to convey breeding through character dialogue I'm trying to write a story based in medieval times. Some of my characters are kings and nobles so I'm trying to make their conversations more...

@Sue2132873

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Your problem is not writing nobility, your problem is writing peasantry.
In modern day we are all well educated and mostly speak the queen's English. In medieval times only the nobility would speak this way. If you want to be authentic your peasants should speak in an uneducated way making grammar mistakes. They may use double negatives, and only know simple words. A few examples that come to mind are: "slave speak", "redneck speak", "ghetto speak". The one you pick may change by region as peasants don't usually travel and have very inbred dialects. Peasants would also compare everything to things they know. Their metaphors would be based on farming, or things in very close proximity. Nobles would make allusions and describe things in a more global scale.
Another part of a peasant is that they are most likely very religious. Everything int heir conversation would most likely tie back to god. The nobility is much more likely to be agnostic. More when talking among themselves. They have a much larger feeling of being in control of their own lives.
So the final product may be something like
"Me gonna to go down this road god willin" vs "I am going to travel this road the the capital city"
On the other hand nobility would speak like us. Use correct grammar, and a large vocabulary. Using British words, or older English gets the point across, but not in an honest way. If everyone is speaking modern English, everyone is speaking modern English. Our politicians don't fall back to old English to sound fancy.

Game of thrones has the popular example of this with peasants saying "milord" and nobility "my lord" because they know it's two words

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