Remember back when I said that you had to use a grammar book
in your writing and you said, “But this is the Regency, they spoke
differently”?
They sure did, but they also spoke differently in
Shakespeare’s time, and in the 21st century, you practically need a
phrasebook to understand Shakespeare. So too in our century, Regency grammar
will jar on your audience. If you really use Regency grammar. Read the Four
Mothers carefully and take notes.
The biggest hurdle to face is that with verbs of motion,
Regency authors do not use “have” as an auxiliary. They use “am”. “I am come to
tell you…” “He was gone to Birmingham…” This derives from French, Je suis venu vous dire… Il est parti or Il est allé … Compare
Georgette Heyer’s use to the Four Mothers; I saw an instance in one of her
books where she had the modern usage, not the Regency usage. This Regency usage
is not passive, this is the grammar of verbs of motion 200 years ago.
Where we would say “Tea was being carried around,” they
might say “Tea was carrying around.” It will help your word count to do
likewise. This is how they expressed the progressive in the Regency period,
it’s a variety of the imperfect tense.
Where we would say “alone”, Regency authors would say
“only”: “That answer only is acceptable.” This is one of those habits of the
Four Mothers you should take notes on in case you decide to use Regency
diction.
In a number of works you will find muted language. One does
not hate rain, one “does not love rain”. A journey may be described as “not
uncomfortable”, a décor as “not unpleasant”.
British authors tend to use “amongst” and “whilst” where
Americans would say “among” and “while”. Study the Four Mothers and see if you
can identify the rules they went by.
Regency authors sometimes say “you was” instead of “you
were,” but only in the singular.
The Four Mothers have all their main characters use proper
grammar; Georgette Heyer lets some of them use bad grammar, especially young
men who are slangy and older men who probably didn’t go up to university. You
may, however, find “eat” and “ate” in unexpected places; I found one example in
Persuasion.
For slang, go through Heyer’s works and make a list with the
modern meanings. For your lower class Londoners, Bow Street Runners, and
criminals, find a dictionary of thieves’ cant online. I think Heyer over-uses
slang; you should probably restrict it to young men talking to each other, not
older men or her Mark II hero and especially not when talking to ladies. Sir
Richard Wyndham gains the respect of a thief by proving that he knows thieves’
cant, but he does not use it toward Penelope Creed.
Be careful about regional dialects. They are just as
difficult to write as foreign languages. Especially in the Celtic parts of the
Kingdom, some people will use words with their old Celtic meaning. So “a brave
lass” does not mean she is courageous, it means she is a fine girl: braw,
brav (from Welsh braf), and Irish brea all look like
“courageous” but they all mean “fine”. Take Florence Castle’s advice – but the
links to the recordings are broken.
This page has links to Youtube clips.
https://www.studiocambridge.co.uk/a-brief-guide-to-british-accents-and-dialects/
Don’t try to represent the accents too closely. I served on
a jury once here in the US and the minute he opened his mouth, one of the
lawyers gave himself away as Irish. It was the quality of his “t” and some of
his vowels that gave him away. Burt Lancaster and Michael Ironside, both of
whom were Irish, had a particular strength to their “l”. You’ll never get that
onto paper, any more than you can get the British difference between “a” before
a double consonant and a single consonant, like “cawn’t” and “het”, the latter
being very close to the Latin æ or German ä.
Especially don't use dialect without a clear geographic connection. Remember, people didn’t travel as much in the Regency
as they do now, and while London might have speakers of every dialect, your
heroine has to have a connection to the region that uses the one you pick to
imitate. So, for example, she ought to have an estate in the west of England, if
you want her footman to use that accent in London. But she probably will not
hire a cockney as a footman, or be served by a cockney in a warehouse (retail
store) or shop. Cockneys were denizens of the City of London, and few ladies
went there because few ladies had business dealings with anybody there, plus
they looked down on Cits as well as cockneys. Tradesmen dealing with the
carriage class hired their own relatives, who spoke much like their customers,
as much not to alienate the customers as to be able to trust employees not to
steal from the shelves or the till (a very real problem up to the invention of
the cash register). A man, however, might have a groom from his own estate, or
hire a cockney. If you want to hear cockney speech, watch Eastenders online –
and remember, a cockney “born within the sound of Bow Bells” rarely left that
region.
https://archive.org/details/1-tv-vhs-rip/1+TV_VHS_RIP.avi
In general, only characters low down in the social scale,
probably not wealthy and therefore stuck most of their lives where they were
born, should use dialect all the time. People higher up will mostly use dialect
when strongly moved and less in control of their speech patterns. People at the
top of the scale will likely use dialect only in fun, and then they will use
the dialect from the shire they grew up in, mimicking their estate workers.
Be very careful about Irish characters and their speech. Don’t
copy the speech patterns of US movie Irish like Thomas Mitchell as Gerald
O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (he could also speak with a perfect American
accent). They are overdone. What I did with a character in one novel was had
him use an Irish bull, an internally contradictory sentence: “Could I be asking
a question and not take offense?” He meant that the person he questioned would
hopefully not take offense, but there’s no pronoun for that person. However,
such sentences are not restricted to the Irish; Sam Goldwyn will forever be
famous for saying “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
Yogi Berra was famous for them: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee_N3g4ORLk
Likewise there are multiple Scottish accents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=styynTNHpVo
And multiple Welsh accents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_2UW8v3Q80
Never let dialect or slang take over your writing. You’re telling a story, not writing a dissertation for ’enry ’iggins (IYKYK). And judge for yourself how much of your audience will sit still for real Regency grammar, or how long they’ll keep trying to understand it before they pitch your book.
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