By Douglas Kruger
SAY you want to set a story in Jersey. You create your characters, plot your cliffhangers, clear a space on your bookcase for that inevitable Pulitzer. Now, how do you go about depicting the accent?
Set a tale in a place like New York and dialogue is a breeze. Just have your characters sip their ‘cwafee’, describe something as ‘yuuuge’, then yell, ‘gedowda hee-a!’.
Need to depict an Irish lilt? No great challenge either. Turn your tee-aitches into harder ‘d’s and ‘t’s. ‘Dat’s it! I shall count to tree!’
Turns out you can even depict nationalities using rude words. My Irish hairdresser recently instructed me in the finer points of a certain coarse expletive and how it changes between England, Ireland and Scotland. Suffice to say, your ‘u’ becomes an ‘e’ or an ‘a’ respectively. We’ll leave it at that.
Cornwall’s no problem either. Just soak up the sounds you hear in any episode of Doc Martin: ‘Oi, Doc! Whirrya goin’?’
But Jersey? How would you create a realistic sounding Jersey character?
For starters, less than half of our population is locally born. That means we begin with a swirling cauldron of tongues, if you will excuse the imagery.
The 46% of Islanders born here will probably greet you with ‘hiya’, so you could make your character say that. The 33% who are Brits may do the same, or they may go with ‘awright?’. If your character is South African born, though, he might say, ‘howzit’. But there’s also ‘olá’, or, if your hero is Polish, ‘czesc’. (Hint: The sound you made in your head is not even close.)
English isn’t truly standardised anywhere. And funny things happen to the language when you leave it unchaperoned. It hangs out at exotic bars, meets dialects from faraway lands, and brings them home to meet its parentheses.
It’s not averse to a little mixing of vowels, either. And nowhere is that more evident than in a small island chiming with immigrant diphthongs.
Observe, for example, how fast kids absorb the local sound palette. For an amusing display of mismatched family tones, just listen to the conversations between parents and kids outside a school, particularly in St Helier. When I ask my South-African-born son whether he has his bag, he no longer says ‘ja’. He now sings out a three-part ‘ye-e-eah’.
It’s even more noticeable when a Madeiran mum asks in Mediterranean tones if her daughter has everything, and little Catarina responds like a character from Oliver: ‘Don’t wurry about a fing, mummy!’
George Bernard Shaw’s Professor Henry Higgins, who takes a bet in Pygmalion that he can refine Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle’s speech, observed that ‘an Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him’.
So what do we do that’s particularly noticeable?
It seems to me that Jersey Beans routinely transform their ‘lys’ into ‘lays’. ‘Basicalleee,’ becomes ‘basic-llaayy’. The same fate befalls you if you’re name is Andy. You no longer rhyme with Sandy, but rather something closer to Mandalay. And all that is before we even get to Jèrriais (does not rhyme with Andy).
Of course, every English-speaking nation has its quirks.
South Africans and New Zealanders drop their ‘i’ sounds way down low. Instead of ‘this is it’, we say, ‘thus uhs uht’. Leonardo DiCaprio did a stellar job of it in Blood Diamond. Aussies, by contrast, raise their i’s up to ‘ee’ sounds, so it becomes: ‘Thees ees eet!’ I once had a cat named Ping. My Aussie friend from Sydney stretched that one, poor syllable into three, like tortured toffee, renaming our pet, ‘Pee-ee-eeng’.
With a little practice, it becomes possible to distinguish one English city from another, but I can only do it in broad brushstrokes. I know, for instance, that someone in the south will ask me to ‘come here, Doug’, while a northerner says, ‘coom here, Doog’.
And if you’re from Scotland, honestly, we didn’t even catch your name. Was it ‘Jim’? Or maybe ‘Tarragon’? Who can say? One delightful Glaswegian working in financial services offered to write down everything he said for me. At least, I think he did.
The English-speaking world presents a delightful mess of sounds for the aspiring author. And that’s before you even get to local phrases that are uncommon in other places. For instance, there are charming expressions here that appear to have escaped the scouring of the PC police. I truly hope that shopkeepers will continue calling me, ‘my lovely’, or ‘my darling’. It’s so delightfully Hobbit-like.
As for terms of endearment… Here, you are someone’s mate. In South Africa, you are someone’s bud or bru (rhymes with poo). In America, you might be someone’s bro, or maybe their pal, though if they call you that in New York specifically, it may not be an extension of friendship, but rather the beginning of a fight. And it’s mom, mum or ma, depending on whether you’re from South Africa, Britain or the American south. Mummy, if you happen to be King.
So there is an overload of options available to the creative storyteller. Perhaps it’s easiest just to forego the colloquialisms. Have your character talk about housing and hospitals instead. Oh, and mention the weather. That’ll sell it.
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Douglas Kruger is the author of 12 non-fiction books and one novel. A transplant from Johannesburg, he lives in St Helier with his wife and five-year-old son, who subjects him to endless viewings of Shaun the Sheep. Meet him at douglaskruger.com.
