: Re: Writing dialogues for characters whose first language is not English I am seriously wondering how to go about writing dialogues for characters whose native language isn't English and who aren't

@Eichhorn147

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If the character only has a very small amount of dialogue in you story, the easiest option is to just describe how he speaks, instead of trying to write out his errors:

The shopkeeper visibly struggled with the language, but he managed to describe the robber's outfit to the police.

If the character has a significant amount of dialogue, it's a bit trickier. The first thing you could to is to limit the character's vocabulary. Find a book that has a list of basic English vocabulary, add some terms related to things the character is familiar with (whether that's nuclear physics or nail salon utensils), and mostly stick to that when he speaks.

Portraying grammatical errors and strong accents is more difficult. The first thing to keep in mind is that for most characters, you won't transcribe every mistake or every "uhh..." in their speech. In books, characters generally speak in coherent, correct sentences unless you're trying to make a specific point. So, consider just writing the character's dialogue as normal, and mentioning their heavy accent or questionable writing skills in places where it makes sense.

If you need to display the character's language mistakes, for example because his struggle to communicate is important to the story, there are two things to keep in mind:

1) His errors should be realistic for a person from his language background.
2) His speech should be comprehensible to the reader.

For the first point, you may need to be familiar with the character's native language and the differences between its grammar and that of English. For example, a German character might not use the future tense, a Russian character may leave out the articles "a" and "the", and a Chinese character may leave out the end-"s" in plurals and verb forms.

At the same time, the errors should make some sense to your readers. It might not be obvious to a reader that the character's language does not have grammatical gender, and that's why he calls Bob "she".

I would avoid trying to transcribe an accent, unless you deliberately want to portray an ethnic stereotype. Things like switching l and r, or writing v in place of w, have too much baggage at this point.

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