: Re: How to write dialogue for someone who is intelligent but barely speaks the language? I have a character who is a refugee from another country. She comes to the protagonist, and they have a

@Dunderdale623

Vote Up Vote Down

Two years ago I took a course with a new professor in our university - a fresh immigrant from the US, who had to teach in Hebrew. Said professor is one of the most brilliant researchers at our faculty, so "intelligent character" - covered. How did he speak?

First there was the accent. 'Heavy' doesn't begin to describe it. In writing, you wouldn't want to write phonetic accent over long chunks of text, as it considerably reduces readability, especially if for your readers English (or whatever language you're writing in) is a second language. But you can mention your character having an accent, you can give an example, you can mention the protagonist struggling to understand what the foreign character is saying. You can look at The Three Musketeers for an example: Dumas repeatedly mentions d'Artagnan's Gascon accent, to the point that it remains his recognisable characteristic in both sequels.

Together with accent comes bad grammar, and confusing similarly-sounding words. Grammar would be influenced by one's country of origin, so you'd do well to find out a little about the language of your character's country of origin. Issues can be misgendering nouns, using the wrong articles (a/an/the), wrong verb conjugations etc. It's important that the meaning of the sentence must remain easily understandable, or you risk losing the reader. Same goes for similarly-sounding words - the reader must understand the original intent. (Bonus points if the wrongly used word results in something funny or inappropriate.)

This professor used simple vocabulary to explain complex ideas. Technical ideas aren't the only ones that can be explained in simple terms. Philosophy, geopolitics etc. can be treated in the same manner. In fact, you have to understand the subject really really well to be able to explain it using only simple words - it's further testimony of intelligence.

The last aspect is the way the character reacts to being in this situation, having to explain oneself in a foreign language. The character might get flustered over unable to explain themselves, crestfallen over making a mistake, resort to hand gestures or drawings to explain themselves... All those can express the fact that the character has more to say, as well as more about what kind of person they are.

(0)

Login to post a comment!