We all know that Gambit is from Louisiana. How do we know? Because he says things like "dis t'ing be out o' control, chere." Or at least that's what he says when he's being poorly written. I don't mean poorly written in the sense of poor character motivation or flimsy dialogue, I mean the basic forming of words is poor.
There is never any reason to write in dialect. Ever. Of course the X-Men are the worst offender so it's easy to pick on them. Whether its Gambit, Rogue, Cannonball or someone else the writers often feel the need to make us "hear the character's voice" in our heads by writing the dialogue phoenitically. Here's a better idea, just write good dialogue and we'll hear them just fine. After all, the writer's don't feel the need to write Xavier with a nasal upstate New Yorker accent so why make Cannonball say things like, "Ah'll be!"
The only dialogue sin worse than writing in dialect is the over dependence on stereotypical speech. For example, we know that Colossus is Russian because he shouts out "boize moi!" And we've all read Nightcrawler call women "frauline" and say "danke" despite the fact that he's lived in the United States for years, has no German friends, doesn't visit Germany nor have any real occasion to speak German. If you're bilingual and live in a country that doesn't speak one of your languages, you're not going to rush to use one of those words [an exception to this rule is if you don't know the English word for something you might insert another that you don't know].
So to recap, a bad way to write Banshee would be "top o' th' marnin' to ya, Beast. Yer lookin' like a right fookin' mess, ye are boyo." A better way to write him would be to say "I haven't thought about that since university." We know that he's Irish, we don't need to be hit over the head with it, if you want to remind us use subtle clues (for example, the UK's use of the word university or hospital without any modifier such as "my" or "the").
Leave a comment