Broken English?

[Rob_Royale]

So there's a lovely older Vietnamese woman who cleans our workshop at work. She speaks English poorly. I'd love to do a story featuring her without changing much but I'm imagining writing her broken English would come off as racist. Thoughts?

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't think it has to come off as racist. But I'd suggest doing some research about it so you get it as right as you can, and when you do it it's better to underdo it than overdo it.

 

[Djmac1031]

Possible racism aside, Broken English reads terrible. It's really distracting, especially if used a lot.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I agree with Simon. If your emphasis is on her poor command of the language, then it probably won’t fly too well. On the other hand, if you paint her as smart and such, despite the language, I think all will be well.

 

[Djmac1031]

Ever watch a bad movie with a bad actor doing a bad accent badly?

Yeah, it's like that.

My suggestion: have her speak English pretty well, but trip over a word or two here and there.

Just don't be heavy handed with it.

A little goes a long way IMO.

 

[StillStunned]

Surely, the convention for someone whose native language isn't English is for them to be able to conduct a whole conversation about geopolitics or the history of Sub-Saharan Africa, but revert to their own language for words like "hello", "yes" and "thank you."

 

[Bamagan]

So there's a lovely older Vietnamese woman who cleans our workshop at work. She speaks English poorly. I'd love to do a story featuring her without changing much but I'm imagining writing her broken English would come off as racist. Thoughts?

I personally would probably back out of the story.
There was one I was reading recently where the Chinese (ethnic) character abruptly reverted from normal English speech to literally, "Me so horny." I gave up on the story at that point.
I don't know if the author was trying for 'verisimilitude' or likes writing to stereotypes or what. Or if they maybe honestly think that's just how certain people talk. But the odds of there being an artistic payoff for that scene if I stuck around seemed very low, so I moved on to something else.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Keep it very low key, maybe one or two defining mannerisms early on to establish character, but you don't need to whip it to death.

 

[djrip]

A senile old Southerner finds himself stranded on a Vietnamese farm, where he has to clean chicken coops to make a living. Not only is his Vietnamese broken, but he is also being used as a sex toy by his femdom farm owner.

Nice work if you can get it.

 

[BobbyLaker]

Ever watch a bad movie with a bad actor doing a bad accent badly?

My fave movie is still Brigadoon though...

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Possible racism aside, Broken English reads terrible. It's really distracting, especially if used a lot.

I have two words for you:

Forrest Gump

While you might not consider it "broken" English, you should try reading it. Challenging, but it brought the character of Forrest to life. Being able to write words as a character would say them and still have readers understand is a talent. I certainly haven't mastered it, but in the stories where I have used it, no one has complained about the writing being demeaning to anyone.

 

[joy_of_cooking]

Surely, the convention for someone whose native language isn't English is for them to be able to conduct a whole conversation about geopolitics or the history of Sub-Saharan Africa, but revert to their own language for words like "hello", "yes" and "thank you."

Not quite as extreme as "hello" but it is a thing for people to have a good grasp of the language they need professionally while still missing more social or colloquial vocabulary.

Imagine a grad student in the biology department encountering a football and reaching for the words he knows and uses daily: "the ball had sort of an ellipsoid morphology, but pointy on the ends."

It does take some skill to do respectfully and accurately, though, so I'm glad you're doing your homework.

 

[Djmac1031]

I have two words for you:

Forrest Gump

While you might not consider it "broken" English, you should try reading it. Challenging, but it brought the character of Forrest to life. Being able to write words as a character would say them and still have readers understand is a talent. I certainly haven't mastered it, but in the stories where I have used it, no one has complained about the writing being demeaning to anyone.

Never read it.

Oh and just for clarity; I never said writing in Broken English IS definitely "racist." Only that it's possible to be perceived that way by some.

 

[Bamagan]

Never read it.

Oh and just for clarity; I never said writing in Broken English IS definitely "racist." Only that it's possible to be perceived that way by some.

There's also a bit of a difference between writing 'broken English' in the sense of a person using it imperfectly as a second (or third, fourth, etc.) language, a person who uses 'pidgin' English with English-speakers who are also communicating in 'pidgin [whatever]', an English speaker with a speech impediment, and an English speaker who uses a highly vernacular, regional, or technical version of the language. Any of those could be used, and often have been used, to add color and distinctiveness to characters. But the same technique would be used by someone who wanted to display scorn for 'foreigners,' or for anyone whose speech patterns suggest a different experience or upbringing to the one the author considers ideal. It can be hard to tell at a glance which way the author is leaning, and some people aren't necessarily willing to stare too long.
So, best of luck finding a way to include the material delicately enough to toe the line between flattery and mockery!

 

[Kumquatqueen]

If you write her as a person, a character of reasonable intelligence, acting like a real person, that's very different to writing her as An Exotic Stereotype. Either way, how well you represent both her speech and what she's actually thinking will affect that.

A couple errors in verb formation or article use generally are enough to give an impression of a language - explaining communication problems may be more interesting than a garbled sentence.

For example in a story where A and B are English speakers, C and D are Turkish, C understands reasonable English, D not much, but B, C and D all know German, and B has an accent that neither C or D can understand in English, you get stuff like this:

The Turkish guys are trying to follow our conversation, eyes flicking back and forth tennis-match style, looking at each other slightly nervously
...The dude nods, ...and returns with...an enormous pump-bottle of lube, which triggers my guy to point and laugh and exclaim what is presumably the Turkish for 'you sly bastard!'

"Oi, towel?" (A) manages to demonstrate a folding action with one hand. My guy (D) clocks what he wants and quickly provides a couple initially-dry towels to stick beneath me. We may have a language barrier but the man's not stupid.

Lots of gestures and mime and showing frustration on both sides can all make the communication more interesting.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Picture a reader asking themselves "Is this broken English as far as the author's idea of Vietnamese people goes? Or is this just one aspect of this one character?" and then consider whether your story helps them answer that question.

Stereotypes are often based in fact, and plenty of people have stereotypical aspects. But nobody is just a stereotype. If you're concerned that your character might be seen as a racial caricature, figure out the aspects of her character that aren't stereotypical and include some of them. Another way to avoid being seen as writing "this is how all Vietnamese people are" is to have more than one Vietnamese character in the story, and show their differences.

And, as others have suggested here, make sure her broken English is the kind a person from that background would speak, not some generic version.

 

[MyBareTorso]

I have two words for you:

Forrest Gump

While you might not consider it "broken" English, you should try reading it. Challenging, but it brought the character of Forrest to life. Being able to write words as a character would say them and still have readers understand is a talent. I certainly haven't mastered it, but in the stories where I have used it, no one has complained about the writing being demeaning to anyone.

Forrest Gump...one of the best examples ever of literate, written vernacular...an amazing book.

 

[MillieDynamite]

The simplest thing is, "This is hard work, and you don't make it easier, sloppy man," she said in her broken English, inserting a Vietnamese word here and there.

 

[XerXesXu]

In my Filipina, Bar Girl stories, I just write English as they speak it. They speak it as a second language as a requirement of their profession, not by tuition as many Filipinos are taught it. I don’t revert to British English when they talk amongst themselves. I have no idea how they sound to each other as they chat in a mix of Bisaya,Wari, Tagalog, Pampango Ilocano etc, but I do know my wife doesn’t understand Iloco, and other girls have told me they don’t understand Pampango, the local language. Nevertheless, they chat away happily.

In other stories I’ve used overcorrect English for educated users of English as a second language when speaking to English people, but standard English when they speak in their native language to others.

Fluent speakers of English as a foreign language I’ve differentiated by eg: at a convenient point describing northern Europeans accent as ‘leaden’ and southern Europeans as ‘musical’.

 

[Britva415]

Another Chekov's Gun item.

What's the point of the language impediment to the story? Rather than focusing on replicating how (you think) it might sound and leaving it to the reader to guess why (the attempt at) such precision matters, why not leave that bit aside in favor of coming right out and saying what the effects were, so that it doesn't matter whether it seems racist on the author's part or not because you didn't make a caricature of the speaker?

Did those hearing it react a certain way? Did it create a communication difficulty which has plot ramifications? Are you showing the characterization of how the inarticulate delivery impacts the speaker?

To paraphrase Chekov, if there's bad broken English in the first act, and it doesn't create a plot hook by the third, it doesn't belong in the story. I mean, that's not to say you can't have an English-inarticulate foreigner in the story, it just means the effort to reproduce your idea of their broken English is completely unnecessary to the story, unless it's a Chekov's gun and there for a plot-critical reason.

 

[TheRedChamber]

What's the point of the language impediment to the story? Rather than focusing on replicating how (you think) it might sound and leaving it to the reader to guess why (the attempt at) such precision matters, why not leave that bit aside in favor of coming right out and saying what the effects were, so that it doesn't matter whether it seems racist on the author's part or not because you didn't make a caricature of the speaker?

Did those hearing it react a certain way? Did it create a communication difficulty which has plot ramifications? Are you showing the characterization of how the inarticulate delivery impacts the speaker?

To paraphrase Chekov, if there's bad broken English in the first act, and it doesn't create a plot hook by the third, it doesn't belong in the story. I mean, that's not to say you can't have an English-inarticulate foreigner in the story, it just means the effort to reproduce your idea of their broken English is completely unnecessary to the story, unless it's a Chekov's gun and there for a plot-critical reason.

I've been doing an off-an-on occasional series of stories set in mainland China and have had to think quite hard about how to present the non-native characters spoken English. Most of the characters speak English very well - in real life though the languages are so different that even a highly competent speaker is going to have a noticeable number of small mistakes (tenses, dropped articles, plurals) in speech. My decision was, while I probably 'could' represent that authentically, I probably shouldn't because fundamentally the MC felt they spoke great English - grammar mistakes jump out of the page at readers and give them the opposite impression though.

The one story where I decided to have a hook-up with two characters who barely speak each other's languages has given me real problems though. The basic idea was for it to be her getting what she wanted from the evening and communication not being important to the encounter. As such I kept a lot of the utterances as short phrases rather than sentences, and had multiple occasions where he says something and she doesn't bother to stop to understand him, and we're probably working within a vocabulary of a couple of hundred words.

And the results are...not great, to be honest. When I have time, I'm going to go back over it and change it to him struggling to speak Mandarin rather than her struggling to speak English. It's not really a question of authenticity - she's actually probably communicating better than her real-life equivalent would, and I've had a ton of similar level conversations over the years. It's just that its very hard for the character I've created and that I know about, not to get reduced by what she is able to communicate in words in a medium that is all about words.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Another Chekov's Gun item.

What's the point of the language impediment to the story? Rather than focusing on replicating how (you think) it might sound and leaving it to the reader to guess why (the attempt at) such precision matters, why not leave that bit aside in favor of coming right out and saying what the effects were, so that it doesn't matter whether it seems racist on the author's part or not because you didn't make a caricature of the speaker?

Did those hearing it react a certain way? Did it create a communication difficulty which has plot ramifications? Are you showing the characterization of how the inarticulate delivery impacts the speaker?

To paraphrase Chekov, if there's bad broken English in the first act, and it doesn't create a plot hook by the third, it doesn't belong in the story. I mean, that's not to say you can't have an English-inarticulate foreigner in the story, it just means the effort to reproduce your idea of their broken English is completely unnecessary to the story, unless it's a Chekov's gun and there for a plot-critical reason.

I don't agree that this is a Chekhov's-gun situation, unless you're arguing that the entire character is superfluous.

Most homes don't have guns hanging on the walls; if you're not going to fire that gun, it's an easy choice to write a story that doesn't mention it. But everybody has a dialect, and unless you're writing a story without dialogue it's natural for that dialogue to come out.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Thanks to everyone for their advice. Much appreciated.

 

[Britva415]

you're arguing that the entire character is superfluous.

If you're arguing that the entire character is the accent, they probably are superfluous.

 

[Bramblethorn]

If you're arguing that the entire character is the accent, they probably are superfluous.

I was under the impression Rob was talking about dialect rather than specifically accent. Either way, I'm not suggesting that it's the entire character, but every character will have a dialect and it's important to characterisation - indeed, the fact that dialect can be used for negative characterisation is the basis for the original question.