Anonymous asked:

I have a question around linguistics within dialogue: my story is set in the early crusades with a character list that include European Christians, Middle Eastern Muslims, and Middle Eastern Christians. As - particularly during this time period - characters coming from different backgrounds would have different linguistical styles, I’m trying to avoid my Middle Eastern characters using expressions that are clearly of English origin, note which characters are speaking which language where necessary, and include transliterated Arabic words/phrases when appropriate. (Your ‘how to convey arabic language in a specific dialect is being spoken without lengthy descriptions of how words/specific letters are pronounced?’ answer was really helpful here, thank you!)

However as a non-Arabic, English speaker I’m also wary of ‘over-peppering’ these Arabic idioms to the extent that the Europeans’ dialogue comes across as ‘standard’ and the Middle Eastern characters’ as ‘exotic’ (I’m conscious that overly formal and ornate language has been a pretty orientalist trope in the past, which I’m trying to avoid). Would you have any recommended rules of thumb on how to keep a good balance, or anything to be wary of/outright avoid here? Thank you so much for any advice you can share!

Love this. I’d try the placeholder method (just made this up.) Honestly, the best thing to do is just write the story first using whatever English expressions come naturally — even if you know they’re super modern or wouldn’t make sense in the time period and setting (like “a dime a dozen” or “barking up the wrong tree”). Don’t stress about making everything historically or culturally perfect right away. That’ll stall the writing process. These non-suitable phrases become ‘placeholders’ to switch out later. 

So keep track of those lines (you can highlight them or jot the the page/line # down somewhere), and then later on, if you know someone who speaks Arabic or is familiar with the culture, ask them to help swap in more fitting phrases, and do a sensitivity read overall. They might not translate word-for-word, but they can help you find alternatives that still match the vibe or emotion of certain idioms. They can also find spots for Arabic idioms that you wouldn’t have expected. 

I found this list from Reddit user AgileCzar about gulf dialect idioms from a decade ago:

• خيرها في غيرها - “a better (one) in another (one)”. Kind of like better luck next time, but without sarcasm
• انا في وادي وانت في وادي - “I am in a valley and you are in a valley” - describes a situation where you and the other person are on different pages, not seeing eye to eye etc…
• يوم عسل ويوم بصل - “A day of honey, a day of onions” - a response when someone asks how you’re doing. Basically saying some days are good and some are bad.
• شو لونك (shoo lunak) - “What’s your color” - used in Kuwait as a greeting (like what’s up)

I would never have thought to do any of these, but they’re really fun! Scouring the internet for options and figuring out where these go is a total second-pass sort of edit. You don’t want to put pressure on yourself to get it all right on the first draft. It’s a lot easier to fix language stuff when you already have the story down.

I do this in scripts a lot when I know something needs to be in Spanish or Arabic, but I’m not clear on the exact wording because finishing the story is more important at that moment.

Good Luck and Happy Writing!

-Melanie 🌻

(Note: this ask has been reviewed and approved by a MENA WWC mod)

This post is part of a double feature for the same ask. First check out Mod Colette’s answer to OP’s original question at: A Careful Balance: Portraying a Black Character’s Relationship with their Hair. Below are notes on character naming from Mod Rina.

~ ~ ~

@writingraccoon said:

My character is black in a dungeons and dragons-like fantasy world. His name is Kazuki Haile (pronounced hay-lee), and his mother is this world’s equivalent of Japanese, which is where his first name is from, while his father is this world’s equivalent of Ethiopian, which is where his last name is from. He looks much more like his father, and has hair type 4a. […]

Hold on a sec.

Haile (pronounced hay-lee), […] [H]is father is this world’s equivalent of Ethiopian, which is where his last name is from. 

OP, where did you get this name? Behindthename.com, perhaps?

ALT

Note how it says, “Submitted names are contributed by users of this website. Check marks indicate the level to which a name has been verified.” Do you see any check marks, OP? 

What language is this, by the way? If we only count official languages, Ethiopia has 5: Afar, Amharic, Oromo, Somali, & Tigrinya. If we count everything native to that region? Over 90 languages. And I haven’t even mentioned the dormant/extinct ones. Do you know which language this name comes from? Have you determined Kazuki’s father’s ethnic group, religion, and language(s)? Do you know just how ethnically diverse Ethiopia is? 

~ ~ ~

To All Looking for Character Names on the Internet:

• Skip the name aggregators and baby name lists. They often do not cite their sources, even if they’re pulling from credible ones, and often copy each other. 
• If you still wish to use a name website, find a second source that isn’t a name website. 
• Find at least one real life individual, living or dead, who has this given name or surname. Try Wikipedia’s lists of notable individuals under “List of [ethnicity] people.” You can even try searching Facebook! Pay attention to when these people were born for chronological accuracy/believability. 
• Make sure you know the language the name comes from, and the ethnicity/culture/religion it’s associated with. 
• Make sure you understand the naming practices of that culture—how many names, where they come from, name order, and other conventions. 
• Make sure you have the correct pronunciation of the name. Don’t always trust Wikipedia or American pronunciation guides on Youtube. Try to find a native speaker or language lesson source, or review the phonology & orthography and parse out the string one phoneme at a time. 

Suggestions for web sources:

• Wikipedia! Look for: “List of [language] [masculine/feminine] given names,” “List of most common [language] family names,” “List of most common surnames in [continent],” and “List of [ethnicity] people.”  
• Census data! Harder to find due to language barriers & what governments make public, but these can really nail period accuracy. This may sound obvious, but look at the year of the character’s birth, not the year your story takes place. 
• Forums and Reddit. No really. Multicultural couples and expats will often ask around for what to name their children. There’s also r/namenerds, where so many folks have shared names in their language that they now have “International Name Threads.” These are all great first-hand sources for name connotations—what’s trendy vs. old-fashioned, preppy vs. nerdy, or classic vs. overused vs. obscure. 

~ ~ ~

Luckily for OP, I got very curious and did some research. More on Ethiopian & Eritrean naming, plus mixed/intercultural naming and my recommendations for this character, under the cut. It’s really interesting, I promise!

Keep reading

@waltzshouldbewriting asked:

Hello!
I’m writing a story that features a character who’s first language is not English. He’s East African, specifically from Nairobi, Kenya, and is pretty fluent in English but it’s not his primary language, and he grew up speaking Swahili first. I’m struggling to figure out if it’s appropriate or in character to show him forgetting English words or grammar. From what I’ve researched, English is commonly spoken in Nairobi, but it wouldn’t be what was most spoken in his home. For context, this is an action/superhero type story, so he (and other characters) are often getting tired, stressed, and emotional. He also speaks more than two languages, so it makes sense to me that it would be easier to get confused, especially in a language that wasn’t his first. But I’m worried about ending up into stereotypes or tropes.
For additional context: I’m monolingual, I’ve tried to learn a second language and it’s hard. A lot of how I’m approaching this comes from my own challenges correctly speaking my own, first and only language.

Diversity in Second-Language English

You seem to have an underlying assumption that second language acquisition happens the same for everyone. 

The way your character speaks English depends on so many unknown factors: 

• Where does your story take place? You mention other characters; are they also Kenyan, or are they all from different countries?
• Assuming the setting is not Kenya, is English the dominant language of your setting? 
• How long has your character lived in Kenya vs. where he is now? 
• What are his parents’ occupations? 
• What level of schooling did he reach in Nairobi before emigrating? 
• What type of school(s) did he go to, public or private? Private is more likely than you think. 
• Did his schooling follow the national curriculum structure or a British one? Depends on school type and time period. 
• Does he have familiarity with Kenyan English, or only the British English taught in school? 
• Is this a contemporary setting with internet and social media?

I bring up this list not with the expectation that you should have had all of this in your ask, but to show you that second language acquisition of English, postcolonial global English acquisition in particular, is complex. 

My wording is also intentional: the way your character speaks English. To me, exploring how his background affects what his English specifically looks like is far more culturally interesting to me than deciding whether it makes him Good or Bad at the language. 

L2 Acquisition and Fluency

But let’s talk about fluency anyway: how expressive the individual is in this language, and adherence to fundamental structural rules of the language.

Fun fact: Japanese is my first language. The language I’m more fluent in today? English. Don’t assume that an ESL individual will be less fluent in English compared to their L1 counterparts on the basis that 1) it’s their second language, or 2) they don’t speak English at home. 

There’s even a word for this—circumstantial bilingualism, where a second language is acquired by necessity due to an individual’s environment. The mechanisms of learning and outcomes are completely different. 

You said you tried learning a second language and it was hard. You cannot compare circumstantial bilingualism to a monolingual speaker’s attempts to electively learn a second language. 

Motivations?

I understand that your motivation for giving this character difficulties with English is your own personal experience. However, there are completely different social factors at play.

The judgments made towards a native speaker forgetting words or using grammar differently are rooted in ableism and classism (that the speaker must be poor, uneducated, or unintelligent). That alone is a hefty subject to cover. And I trust you to be able to cover that!

But on top of that, for a second language speaker, it’s racism and xenophobia, which often lend themselves to their own ableist or classist assumptions (that those of the speaker’s race/ethnicity must be collectively unintelligent, that they are uneducated or low class due to the occupations where they could find work, or conversely that they are snobby and isolationist and can’t be bothered to learn a new language). Intersections, intersections.

If you want to explore your experiences in your writing, give a monolingual English speaker in your cast a learning disability or some other difficulty learning language, whatever you most relate with. And sure, multilingual folks can occasionally forget words like anyone else does, or think of a word in one language and take a second to come up with it in the other language. But do not assume that multilinguals, immigrants, or multiethnic individuals inherently struggle with English or with multiple languages just because you do.

~ Rina

@kuno-chan said:

I’m Pacific Islander, specifically quarter-Chamorro and quarter-Filipina. Like, born and raised on Guam, connected with my culture and largely raised on that side of the family. In my YA Indigenous fantasy, I call the elemental shapeshifters of the story “Honu” because, in our language, it doesn’t mean anything, really. I’ve found out in Hawaiian it means “turtle.” Which are sacred to Hawaiians, but not to us Chamorro. We eat and make jewelry out of turtles. Might this be a problem?

I do not see an issue with this. Honu are sacred, but so are all living things in Hawaiian culture. Unless the character is Hawaiian or Hawaiian-coded, I would like to think folks won’t associate them with Hawai’i. 

- Ren

@corrupted—minds​ submitted:

In my story there are different continents inspired by sections of our world; fantasy Europe, fantasy East Asia, fantasy Middle East, ect. And each continent, for convenience, speaks one language. Cantonese is fantasy East Asias language, for example.

Now on to naming conventions. While in fantasy Europe people have average european names, about 30% have fantasy names like Illumina or Crystal or Raten Firewalker. I want to try to keep the same naming ratio for the other continents, but I’m not sure if it would be offensive for me, as a white woman, to cut apart a language to make a cool sounding name for my characters that are POC.

If you have any insight, suggestions, or just flat out think it’s a bad idea, please let me know. I dont want to unintentionally offend anyone.

On the Issue of Worldbuilding

The salient point is to avoid using languages from real life outright. Already, I sense that your language and coding categories are too broad. It’s never a good idea to reduce such large regions containing so many ethnicities to a single language group/ setting. Think more granular and use single ethnicities instead. Rina has already written on naming conlangs, including pertinent resource links, that I think would be very helpful information for you. Please read her comments here. 

Furthermore, as a reader, I think it is more realistic and dynamic when the characters have names that mean something in their own languages. Most people already have such names IRL. I think in many Western cultures, some are simply too removed from the original root languages to know the word origins of their names. My pen-name here on WWC happens to mean “Jasmine” both in Sanskrit and Japanese, but Marika is a lot more culturally relevant than “Jasmine” as it expresses my bicultural identity much more effectively. Thus, I am curious as to why you wish to stick to this arbitrary 30% rule. Not only does it strike me as rather boring, but it also generates a lot of dissonance for me as a reader in conventional fantasy when a person “randomly” has a conventional fantasy name with no context given. 

If people are given atypical naming schemes, I’d much rather there be a sensible reason for this choice. It both provides context and lays the groundwork for world-building information that the reader can draw on unconsciously at a later time. For example, as I continue my role as this blog’s Tamora Pierce evangelist, the author has two such examples of atypical naming in her universes. In the Tortall series, the Shang warriors are given titles that reflect their prowess, with more legendary animals indicating higher levels of mastery. Thus, the reader automatically knows that Liam Ironarm, the Dragon, and Kylaia al Jmaa, the Unicorn, supersede Ida Bell, the Wildcat, and Hakuin Seastone, the Horse, in terms of skill. In the Emelan Universe, dedicates of the Living Earth religion choose names associated with plants, animals and natural phenomena ( e.g. Rosethorn, Frostpine, Moonstream) and lack last names. Academic mages, on the other hand, have last names that demonstrate what kind of magic they are proficient in (Goldeye, Ladyhammer, Glassfire), allowing us to immediately discern who is a dedicate in the Living Earth faith, who is an academic mage, and who is neither (whether they be from a different background or are still in training).  

Lastly, as a caution, we would like to warn many of our readers that words commonly associated with imagery used in Norse mythology are now often dog-whistles or outright references to white supremacy groups/ movements (Thanks Neo-Nazis!). Thus, particularly for white/ Western-coded characters, please check any name meanings against the following databases created by Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League (viewable here and here).

- Marika.

On Colonial Implications

I would like to emphasize how flattening it is to summarize any large region down to a single language: British Columbia and some of Washington State have 7 mutually unintelligible language families within a few hundred square miles. That’s an incredibly saturated amount of linguistic diversity in a very, very small region. And it’s not the only linguistic hotspot in the world.

Europeans often have an artificial sense of how many languages are natural in a region, because Europe is one of the least linguistically diverse regions in the world at about nine language families, with 94% belonging to a single language family. Meanwhile, China alone has at least nine families, and India has at least six. In North America, you have dozens if not hundreds of language families across the continent.

Note that these are language families, not languages. Each language family can have anywhere from 2 to 50+ languages within it. The aforementioned language family with 94% of Europe is Indo-European, which covers everything from French (the Romance branch) to Punjabi (the Indo-Iranian branch) to Russian (the Balto-Slavic branch).

Convenience should not come at the expense of linguistic diversity. Language destruction is one of the targets of colonialism, and doing such a flattening would leave an extremely sour taste in my mouth at the implied history of this world. Many, many Indigenous languages are extinct because colonial languages were forced upon the populations of the Americas (English, Spanish, Portugese, French), and this isn’t counting non-European colonialism. 

Widespread single languages across huge landmasses often come with an extremely bloody history (unless it was purposely crafted for ease of communication among groups, such as Plains Sign Language), and for your marginalized readers it will be unignorable. You don’t have to create a continent’s worth of languages, but you do have to acknowledge the diversity is there.

As Marika said, focus on individual ethnicities instead of such broad land masses. Doing your current track would pull anyone with even an ounce of linguistics education, or anyone who has had their access to language suffer because of colonialism, right out of the story.

~ Mod Lesya

I agree with Mod Lesya, especially when it comes to their point of language destruction being one of the targets of colonialism. East Asia already has a history of this, with languages being banned and punishments for speaking them, and even now in mainland China Mandarin is being pushed as the only dialect to speak vs. Cantonese, Hokkien, Sichuanese, etc. A suggestion I have is to perhaps have one common language for diplomacy/trade purposes that is used alongside other languages and dialects in certain regions. 

–mod Jess

@inksperks​ said:

Hello! I have a fantasy story that focuses on two distinct kingdoms. The first uses greek names and the other uses french and japanese names, but each kingdom has its own culture and languages that are explicitly not from those or any other irl cultures. Is it problematic to use just the names in a fantasy setting?

More like it makes no sense from a worldbuilding standpoint. 

• Are these languages conlangs that sound/look like French/Japanese/Greek? Or are these languages entirely different conlangs, with featured names in the story that happen to work with French/Japanese/Greek phonology or are coincidentally the same? 
• I also wonder what your consonant inventory & syllable structures look in the one that supposedly mixes Japanese & French. Also morphology! For place names especially you’re going to have to consider that these languages form new words out of morphemes VERY differently. 
• Greek & French-Japanese are V E R Y different languages (though Greek and French are very distantly related through Indo-European). If these two kingdoms are in areal proximity to each other, what makes their languages so different? Is there a geographic barrier (like a mountain range) that isolated them and allowed for divergence over a long time depth? 
• If these kingdoms trade with each other or interact, you’re going to get a lot of crossover in the vocabulary via borrowing, especially for borrowable semantic domains like luxury goods, non-native flora & fauna, cultural terms, etc. This is especially if the two kingdoms have a political history. 

Are you prepared to do this research? Are you prepared to think very hard about the conditions that make this linguistic landscape even remotely possible? Methinks that, rather than hitting “random country/language generator” to build your worlds, you should put in the work to come up with one solid naming conlang that has some slight variation across the neighbouring kingdoms’ languages. If you want to go the route where there is sufficient geographic isolation and you can justify there being divergence, then you can make two naming conlangs, but I would really reconsider your choices in the source/inspiration languages. 

Here’s my guide on conlanging a “naming” language which is essentially the bare minimum bones you need for internally consistent fantasy language names (people, places, things). 

~ Mod Rina

Echoing Rina, this world-building makes no sense to me. Here are my thoughts from a non-linguistic/ storytelling standpoint. Firstly, there’s the issue of dissonance. Language contains a great deal of data about a culture that helps us better understand how the society using the language operates. Thus, as a reader, I think I would be struck by the disconnection between the cultural “feel” of your individual kingdoms and the languages employed. Secondly, effective coding often relies on passive details from visible aspects of the culture (like language) to allow the readers to use their imagination to fill in the gaps that the author does not explicitly detail on their own. By dismembering language from culture, you, as the author, are going to have to be very literal and do much of the heavy lifting in your descriptions. Please consider rethinking, and re-submit once you are better able to justify this approach. 

PSA to all of our users: This lack of clarity w/r to intent has been a general issue with many recent questions. please remember that if you don’t explain your motivations and what you intend to communicate to your audience with your plot choices, character attributes, world-building etc., we cannot effectively advise you beyond the information you provide. We Are Not Mind Readers. If, when drafting these questions, you realize you can’t explain your motivations, that is likely a hint that you need to think more on the rationales for your narrative decisions. My recommendation is to read our archives and articles on similar topics for inspiration while you think. I will be attaching this PSA to all asks with similar issues until the volume of such questions declines. 

-Marika. 

@king-ofconfusion​ asked:

So im writing a fantasy story that mostly takes place on an island between canada and russia. The magical community is hidden from everyone else and their main land/school is on this island, and even tho there are smaller places all over the world this is the main place. Theres some sort of translation spell so everyone understands eachother but i dont want it to seem like american washed or smth? race isnt a problem plot wise but i also dont want it to be so background that it seems all white?

I’ll focus on the part about the translator, as when you say “American washed” I assume you mean the Anglocentric (English-centric) bias that could arise with the concept of a universal translator. Mod Lesya will talk about your…choice of location for this school.

As a bilingual & linguist who thinks in a quasi-combination of languages, I think I’d like to see an idea of a spell that translates to that individual’s unique linguistic interface; if your story has multiple closed POVs, you can show hints of that by having different POV characters hear dialogue differently—maybe language-unique lexemes (vocabulary) are being borrowed! Maybe there’s code-switching! If your story has a more omniscient POV then you might have a part that explains how the spell works, or show through ambiguities in dialogue that shows that characters are hearing dialogue differently depending on what languages they understand. 

• As an example, think of how a character who speaks German, an agglutinative language, might create new vocabulary by stringing together morphemes, and a character who doesn’t speak an agglutinative language would hear that via the spell as a literal-translation-of-words-strung-together. 
• Think of semantic differences/ambiguities that the spell might not (or might! Up to you!) catch—I give an example on the differences between answering negative yes-no questions in English vs. Japanese here. 
• You might even get cases of characters who speak languages that may name borrowings with prototypical labels (English does this, but other languages like Spanish do too). An example is referring to masala chai as “chai tea.” What happens if a Hindi or Urdu speaker hears this? The translator may either literally translate and return “tea tea,” or it might apply context and return “masala chai.” Here’s some more food for thought on borrowings & prototypes! 

Assuming you’re writing this story in English, there will unavoidably be some bias towards English as the basis for your translations. But hopefully this approach gives some ideas for challenging English-as-default by representing forms and meanings that don’t exist in English, and not assuming English is necessarily the prototype for these translations.

~Mod Rina 

Here’s the elephant in the room Rina tapped me to answer: you’ve chosen Indigenous land for a magic school, without acknowledging any Indigenous peoples in your worldbuilding or ask.

The arctic is not uninhabited. That stretch of land between Russia and Alaska (Canada does not go that far West) is the region of Yupik peoples, both on the Russia and Alaska sides (it’s the only language family that is found in both the old and new world), and the Iñupiat peoples, just on the Alaska side (as far as I’m aware).

If you do mean Canada, then you’re getting onto the polar ice cap… and this is also not completely uninhabited. This territory would belong more to Inuit peoples.

In short: you’re at a pretty large risk of having this school be on Indigenous lands, and whether or not it’s a colonial outpost or simply a safe haven depends on how they go about it.

It is possible that there is a genuine, respectful relationship between the Indigenous peoples and the school. The school would have to surrender its land ownership to the people local to the region, respect hunting grounds, not muck with the ecology of the place, and help the people of the region. They would, essentially, acclimate into Arctic life, creating a cultural hybrid between their old customs and what is required to be in the Arctic.

But if you start to have this school try to recreate European ideals, foods, and have them insist their way of life is the only way that can exist, then your magic users have become colonizers. It’s, unfortunately, that simple.

The thing about this island is: Indigenous peoples would’ve known about it, probably before these magic users did.

Arctic peoples also crossed between Russia and Alaska “late” (after the land bridge sank), and very well could have found this island in the time they travelled by water between the two countries. Late is relative, because it was still at least ten thousand years ago.

That land could very well have been inhabited before the magic users got there, which means they would have had to be extremely respectful to not colonize that land. As I said above, it’s possible to be respectful, but requires the magic school default to Indigenous voices when it comes to how to live there.

If it’s uninhabited, then it’s likely known about. These magic users probably don’t have enough magic to completely alter the wave patterns of the ocean, which an ocean-navigating Indigenous people would absolutely know how to use in order to find land (this is one of the ways many peoples navigate at sea).

The other option is the school is actually Yupik or other Arctic peoples founded and uses their belief structure, which would require an intense amount of working with the peoples in question to inform your worldbuilding. 

To be clear: you still need to account for Indigenous peoples and research/talk to members of the peoples I listed above. It’s just going to be less work if you stick with a European magic system and have them be visitors working heavily with Arctic peoples, instead of having the magic system be based in Arctic peoples’ customs.

I’m not from the Arctic. The Arctic has a unique colonization history that I’m not very well educated upon, beyond the fact it’s unique, recent, and suddenly devastating. I cannot advise you on this any more than saying you are on Indigenous lands. I would strongly suggest you look at all of the other “remote, uninhabited” compounds you’ve created to see what Indigenous peoples live in those regions, as well. 

The idea that the earth is mostly barren and unused and lacks meaningful human presence is a colonialist myth that is used to perpetuate the concept (white) Europeans can move in without consequence. Many harsh climates have Indigenous peoples living there, and any magical communities need to do similar practices to the ones I outlined above.

Make sure they’re not taking land, and make sure they learn how to respect it the way the local peoples do: sustainably. That’s the bare minimum.

~ Mod Lesya