Heard on the Streets of London (Part One)
As someone who has spent 23 years living and/or working London (and another ten of visiting it), I am used to the way it sounds when you are walking around. To answer a request from @shelleysprometheus, I can offer some advice.
For fanfic writers, how your characters SOUND is almost as important a part of their characterisation as their clothes, looks, and mannerisms.
London is one of the most multicultural cities in the world. Not just because it draws in tourists from the four corners of the earth, but also because so many different nationalities come to live here.
If you are as observant with your ears as with your eyes, just walking around you will be able to hear a cacophony of accents. Learning to distinguish between them is a challenge (one that Sherlock has risen to and at least in my stories uses his ear for languages as a key deductive tool).
There are some seven thousand languages spoken in the world today and over two hundred and fifty of those are spoken by residents of London, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world.
Bengali has been officially named as the second most-spoken language in London, followed by Polish and Turkish – with over 165,000 London residents speaking one of these three as their first language. Add in Guajarati, Panjabi and Urdu, as the next highest on the top ten and you begin to realise how evident the South Asian community is.
I was surprised to learn that Turkish came so high up the list, only uncovering the fact when I researched the area around the Harringay Ladder (the area of London that has the densest population of Turkish residents).
Be careful about stereotyping. Not all black residents of London are Afro-Caribbean; there is a very large Nigerian community, too, and they could be speaking any one of a half-dozen different languages such as Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Fulfulde.
That’s another interesting point - the languages your characters will overhear on the streets, in shops, or at a bar will depend on WHERE you are in London. It’s like a huge mosaic of different little villages where the majority of the residents will share one main language as well as English and their expression of English will be determined by their first language.
This is a useful research site: London’s Demographics, which can help.
How does the writer deal with it?
It’s a simply google search to locate the areas where certain nationalities hang out. South Kensington is the location of choice for a lot of Americans; Brixton, Southwark and Elephant & Castle are areas with dense afro-Caribbean populations. Tower Hamlets and Newham have the highest concentrations of Bengali speakers.
If your characters are of Pakistani- origin, head east not west. Redbridge’s Loxford ward – located between Ilford and Barking – has the greatest number of residents of Pakistani birth or descent. Neighbouring Clementswood ward comes next. After those come three wards on the east side of Newham.
Belgravia and Knightsbridge are where you will hear a lot of Arabic and Russian spoken. Polish speakers are densest in Ealing, and further out in Barnet, Hounslow, Brent and Waltham Forest.
Ealing is an interesting example of how you need to dig a bit deeper. It’s the area with the highest % of residents of Indian origin, but there are significant differences of religion. The wards with the largest Indian communities are Ealing’s Southall Green and Southall Broadway and Brent’s Wembley Central and Alperton. There are, however, significant differences between those two boroughs’ Indian communities. In Ealing (Southall), Sikhs are the largest religious group, though there are also many Hindus and Muslims. Brent’s strongly Indian wards are mainly Hindu, with relatively few Muslims and very few Sikhs.
So put your characters in the right place, speaking the right languages.
One of the main tips is to use vocabulary that the characters would use, even when they are speaking English. It’s like seasoning your dialogue, sprinkling a bit of authenticity.
How do you write an accent? Carefully is the simply answer. Sometimes it is easiest to look at how the person from one area will speak English. Most Eastern European languages, for example, don’t use articles. If I want a Bulgarian to say some dialogue, I would write something like “Is not crime” rather than “is not a crime” or “is not the crime.”
You can also write phonetically. I did that a lot for the Irish accents needed in my story In Madness Lies Sanity:
"Tahld ya to get ahff me land oehnless de shades gaht a warrant." The thick accent of the farmer grates a bit on Sebastian's nerves.
I hope this helps add authenticity and richness to your writing.
Part Two of this post will cover the varieties of English spoken- from South London to North, to “estuarine” and “street”, Londoners of all sorts tailor their English and reveal where they come from and a whole host of other clues that Sherlock can detect.
