Writing Outside Your Culture: Language Issues

The characters in Creating Esther speak two languages, which makes the work harder for me as the author. At the beginning of the book, Ishkode understands some English but speaks and thinks in Ojibwe. Once she reaches the boarding school, she still thinks in Ojibwe but is forbidden to speak it. So how do I distinguish between the different languages without confusing my readers?

The second issue is how to write the dialogue and text when Ishkode and her friends speak or write English. At a conference I attended several years ago, a speaker said that broken English and grammar errors tell the reader that the character is unintelligent, even when that is neither the reality (to the extent fiction reflects reality) nor the message the author intended to convey. The speaker said the better option is to keep the character’s English sentence structure and vocabulary simple at first and to make them more complicated as the character learns the language. Good advice, and something I may not have thought of on my own.

I bought a number of books to help me bridge these language barriers, including two scholarly studies on how students acquired English language skills in the boarding schools, two basic books on Native American sign language (which I ended up not using), and two Ojibwe dictionaries. But although they gave me some help, I had to figure it out myself.

So what did I do?

I made Ishkode a quick learner who had been attending the reservation day school for several years before the story opens, which allowed me to start her with a basic command of English. Since all of Ishkode’s narrative thoughts would be in Ojibwe,however, they could be more complex than if they were in English. So although I had to simplify the dialogue, I didn’t have to simplify the narrative.

I still needed to signal which language my characters were speaking when there was dialogue. I solved that problem by specifically stating when people were speaking English in Part I (on the reservation) and Part II (travelling to the boarding school), which tells the reader that the rest of the dialogue was spoken in Ojibwe. I reversed the process for Part III (at the boarding school), which mentions when people are speaking Ojibwe. And yes, Ishkode and her friends do defy the ban on speaking Ojibwe.

As far as I can tell, I succeeded in distinguishing between the languages without confusing my readers. My beta readers all followed the story, and none of them mentioned any problems with how I handled the language issues.

But it wasn’t an easy puzzle to solve.

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This post is a revision of the November 24, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.