FWIW, the "forgettin'" would drive this ex-Southerner crazy--partly because it distracts my eye and slows down the reading process, and partly because I still drop about 50% of my G's, but no one would ever write me with misspelled dialogue because my accent and diction code to Well-Educated Coastal-Dwelling Urban White American.
Is this true, even if the writer uses other um...I don't know what to call it...
In dialogue, I would totally have a character (any character--not just Southern) say, "Gonna" for "going to", because that's what people say. I would use contractions like "should've" which, in narration, I would only render as "should have".
eta...
I would also have a Northerner use "forgettin'" if it was a word he would say. That wasn't exclusive to Southerners--I just couldn't think of another analogous example.
I run into that all the time writing Wire fic because half the characters are dealers and speak street slang, like a lot. And I'm a white girl that grew up in the suburbs, and used to get embarrassed typing "motherfucker"(NSM, anymore)
But I like those guys and like how they talk. I want them to sound like them, but I know that some of the choices I might make might look like they have negative racial overtones. I don't want to make fun of them.
I use contractions all the time in dialogue, and often in narration, but that's not the same as misspellings. I don't think I've ever replaced "going to" with "gonna," but it'd stick out like a sore thumb in a historical.
But I'm still against misspelled dialogue on the whole, because it slows me down and makes me think about the fact that I'm reading rather than the characters and the story events, if that makes any sense. But it depends on your style and the kind of story you want to tell, too. And while I may wish that I could make my preferences into rules, I know I can't.
I use a particular style for my English characters, but that doesn't really qualify as patois; it's more the way individual characters use the King's (or, in Ringan's case, John Knox's) English.
I see exactly what you mean. If I were to write a character from New England (specifically, Cape Cod), I wouldn't try to spell out the magical migrating "R" to convey locale. I'd try to rely on things like "go get me a couple cans of tuna from down cellar" or "don't touch them boxes neither" to get across the local flavor.
Um?
It may just be a Cape thing, but my family there uses "neither" almost as an emphatic negative at the end of a sentence.
Oh. It might be. It might even be a family thing, or social circle sort of thing. I was caught short by both the "neither" and the "them boxes".
Can we talk regionalisms for a minute? Does anyone outside of Somerville say "So don't I" when they mean "So do I"?
I've heard that. . . but where?
