When writing dialogue for historical fiction, it’s important to create a sense of the era for your readers. But how do you figure out what people sounded like 80 or 200 years ago? More research of course!
Rather than relying on movies and books written about your novel’s time period, try using books, letters, plays, and recordings created in that era. Of course, that is easier said than done for some time periods. The earliest audio recordings were made in the mid-1800s and there is very little available before the 1900s. While written books, and documents tend to use more formal writing than the average person was using to converse in any given time, you can usually pick up on some common words or phrases that were in use. Another great resource is reading court records because they often recorded everything verbatim and included a wide class of people.
Another great way to find words to flavor your dialogue is to look at word usage for your particular historical period. There are several good sources for checking word usage in a particular time. Of course, the further back you go the harder these sources are to find and the more likely the language will be indecipherable to your average reader.
Online sources for checking historical word usage:
- To find out the origin of words or when they started being used try an Etymological Dictionary.
- For sources of historical Slang try Green’s Dictionary of Slang.
-On Internet Archive you can find a number of print versions of historical dictionaries, including in a wide variety of languages.
- Google’s Ngram view provides a broad view of how often a word or phrase was found in written books from 1800 onwards.
-The Historical Thesaurus of English can provide a starting point for researching specific historic words.
- If you are looking for words in other languages and not sure where to start Lexilogos has a compiled a vast array of sources in a long list of languages.
A note of caution: if you are going to use AI to research word or phrase usage during a particular time period, I suggest using it as a starting point and not a definitive source.
Avoid anachronisms
Beware of inadvertently introducing anachronisms to your manuscript by having characters use words and phrases, especially metaphors or swear words, that are drawn from a time after the characters were alive. The opposite can also be true and provides endless frustration for some authors.
Many times writers discover that particular words were in existence long before modern readers realize it. That means words that were in fact common to a particular time period may feel too modern for many readers. Some authors choose to use the words anyways and might add a some details about the use of language in an author’s note. Others may decide to go for an authentic feel even if it is not entirely accurate. The important thing is to make those decisions consciously because it works for the story.
Writing authentic sounding dialogue can be a lot of fun as long as you don’t overload the reader. I cover more details in the beginners guide to writing historical dialogue.
