: Re: Literate Cherokee and English dialogue east of the Mississippi in the 1860s with a nineteenth century narrator It is my understanding that the Cherokee, prior to the Trail of Tears were bilingual,

@Rivera824

Vote Up Vote Down

T.E.D.'s answer is a very useful one on the historical side. I'd suggest also reasoning through the probability that they would have the same accent. To do that we need to consider the upbringing and skills of both of characters. You say:

It is my understanding that the Cherokee, prior to the Trail of Tears
were bilingual, being educated in both Cherokee and English. Is it
possible that a Cherokee man in his late twenties would have the same
accent as a fifteen-year-old Caucasian male? Both characters were
Christian, educated in schools, and lived in villages of log houses.

and that this is set

east of the Mississippi in the 1860s.

This is not enough information to determine some crucial details, so please answer for yourself the following questions:

Were they raised in the same village with the same school and schoolmaster, same church, same public figures? Neighboring villages? 100 miles apart?
Do your characters speak different first languages?
What languages are spoken around their houses? Are they constantly being exposed to their native tongue and only learning about the other language in a specific setting (e.g., school, church, trading)?
Is the Cherokee man being exposed to English speakers from a certain part of the U.K? Does the white kid's family come from that same very specific part of the U.K.? Or did all the English speakers come from the same neighborhood of Baltimore after a couple of generations of living there? If not, what have their journeys been?

Accents in the U.K., historically and still today, are extremely regionally specific and can vary from town to town because it was much harder to travel and communicate accents through regular dialogue. I would bet it was the same among Native American villages. Mass immigration and displacement would have had dramatic effects on the transmission of accents in both European immigrants to North America and also to the native populations, but they would not have become homogenized across the entire eastern half of the U.S., nor even between villages more than a day's journey apart.

If they did not grow up in the same villages or around people with the same accent, are your characters sensitive to register, i.e., do they pick up on and have the ability to switch between different modes of speaking (different dialect, accent, syntax, vocabulary) for different audiences, even in their second language? (This is also known as code switching.)

If so, your characters may be able to adjust to speaking the same way the other one does in either language. But then the way they speak may not be consistent throughout your book, because they might speak differently at home or with other strangers than they do with each other.

Also bear in mind that, even with the same cultural background, language evolves surprisingly fast, and teenagers are always tweaking it for communication with their peers. Even if they speak with exactly the same accent there might be some slight variation in slang, idiom, or other speech differences, particularly if they are in two different villages or they hang out with groups with different first languages or otherwise limited social interactions with each other.

In sum, I think it is possible, but not likely, for your characters to have the same accent, depending on a number of critical factors coming together.

(0)

Login to post a comment!