Part 11 in the series, A Literary Search for Meaning by Dr Karen Hughes
The creation of alien dialect, like the evocation of unnatural perspectives, must be a construct. Author David Mitchell, who coined the term “Bygonese” to describe the dialect in his historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, says a created language is often more plausible than an exact reproduction of the language on which it is based (Historical Fiction). The language of the text must feel authentic, even if it requires substantial manipulation by the author to make it so. Bryony Stocker, also writing about historical fiction, claims that “Authenticity and, by extension, realism seems to be a prerequisite for readers to take these fictions seriously” (309). Stocker notes that historical accuracy has long been demanded by awards bodies and literary critics as a measure of “good” historical fiction. The same could be said of speculative fiction, and in particular, science fiction. In a 2020 interview, Kim Stanley Robinson said that “to make a good novel, and yet also have the story set in the future, which is a bit of a crazy thing, I had to overcompensate and try to make them even more realistic than your ordinary realist novel” (Robinson). Even though readers of speculative fiction must accept verisimilitude over historical accuracy, a certain amount of realism and apparent realism in both language and setting is necessary to create authentic characters and a believable world.
The first part of my new novel, Gaba Gali, takes place in a mundane setting with a causal flow of events. This world is familiar to the reader, despite its futuristic dystopian attributes, and I made every effort to naturalise the characters, basing them on personality research and my observations of the people around me. To develop Kayla’s character, I studied first-hand accounts of mystical experiences, hypnosis and other psychotherapies, and examined the romantic idealist personality structure, referring to the work of Almaas, of Naranjo, and of Maitri. Jordy is an engineer and a more cerebral personality type. My research into the relevant language patterns and thinking style of his personality type determined how Jordy would narrate his chapters, and the development of his character determined the trajectory of his spiritual crisis, together with its surprising resolution. I also researched more practical matters, such as rare-earth mining, thorium fission reactors, vaccine adjuvants, and other current and futuristic technologies to give Jordy an authentic and reliable voice. I based Tess’s personality on the duty-bound reformer or perfectionist, who believes both she and the world are defective and must be improved. Tess is notably materialistic in the view of her siblings and as presented by her own preoccupation with owning things and adapting her appearance (though not as extremely as Ava) early in the novel. To make Tess’s narrative more realistic, I researched psychedelic drug use, cancel culture, social media, consumerism and other aspects of modern Australian life, imagining how these might look in a few decades. While I used contemporary Australian English for my narrators in the mundane world, with the occasional Mandarin or Cantonese word embedded to illustrate the Chinese influence on their society, I was forced to be more creative in the “unnatural” sections, particularly when the characters are speaking from other dimensions.
Mitchell addresses the difficulties of inventing unfamiliar dialect in relation to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet:
Then you have to worry about language. Unless you have an entire historical novel made out of reported speech (easier to digest bubble pack) the characters must open their mouths at some point, and when they do, how are they going to speak? This is the “lest” versus “in case” dilemma: the sentence-joint “in case” (as in “eat now in case we don’t have time later”) smells of modern English, but a “correct” translation into Smollett’s English (“Eat on the nonce, My Boy, lest no later opportunity presents itself”) smacks of phoniness and pastiche if written in 2010. It smacks, in fact, of Blackadder, and only a masochist could stomach 500 pages. To a degree, the historical novelist must create a sort of dialect—I call it “Bygonese”—which is inaccurate but plausible. Like a coat of antique-effect varnish on a pine new dresser [sic], it is both synthetic and the least-worst solution. (Historical Fiction)
The futuristic and multidimensional characters in Gaba Gali must also “open their mouths” and, even without the constraints of historical accuracy, the dialect must be plausible. Mitchell employs his Bygonese in both past and future settings in Cloud Atlas, an “optimistic, humanistic” (Dillon 179–80) post-modern novel structured as six nested stories in six different genres, ranging from a nineteenth-century travel journal to post-human and post-apocalyptic science fiction. In the historical journal chapters, Mitchell uses uncommon words and expressions to create the dialect of his narrator Adam Ewing, including replacing “and” with “&”, capitalising the word “Ailment”, and employing seemingly archaic (and sexist) phrases such as “A quarter-hour’s gallop on the comeliest filly in my stable!” (Cloud Atlas 7). In the dystopian post-human chapters, titled “An Orison of Sonmi~451”—an archived holographic recording in which the “fabricant” Sonmi~451 relates her tale of corporate oppression—the spelling is modernised as “tonite”, “slite”, “xsistence”, “xplained”, “perq”, etc. and words like “corpocracy”, “lead-tox”, “synthetic melon”, “petro- clouds”, “dewdrugs” and “medicube” evoke a futuristic world where fabricants who are almost human are recycled as food products. The post-apocalyptic chapter, an oral tale which is bookended by Sonmi’s chapters to form the central part of the novel, is told around the campfire, first by the protagonist Zachry and finally in a postscript by his son, who refers to his deceased father as “a wyrd bugger” (324) and questions whether his stories were true. While there are futuristic references—specifically in relation to Sonmi and the orison—the whole chapter is told in an earthy dialect with a heavy use of the vernacular, creating an almost medieval atmosphere:
Now the candle o’ civ’lize is burnt away, does any o’ this matter? Well, I can’t say yay an’ I can’t say nay. I jus’ place my soul in Sonmi’s hands an’ pray she’ll lead my soul to a good place in the next lifecos she saved my soul in thisun an’ by’n’by, if the fire don’t dozy you to sleep, I’ll be tellin’ you how. (255)
As Mitchell demonstrates, creating authentic dialect in an alternative paradigm takes imagination and an ear for language. I attempted to capture the Terran voices in a fluid prose that moves easily between the individual and collective mind of the narrator. The simultaneous first-person language, fragmented and with less punctuation, reflects the earlier “unnatural” experiences of the narrators and the reader is thus primed to accept these passages as an authentic account of the narrators’ non-ordinary human experience. The voice of ninth-dimensional Arya, a minor character, together with the channelled voices of the seventh-dimensional oversoul take the reader even further outside their comfort zone by asking them to accept characters with a worldview beyond human understanding:
As you are moving through the transition, you are finding you can be uitnodigend not only other human souls to share your physical body, but also those extradimensional beings who have some verbinding with your Terran self. If you are choosing it, you can be allowing these energetic beings to be door je heen spreken … speaking through you.
Arya speaks in the present progressive tense, placing her in a continuous moment where nothing is fixed or permanent. I was influenced by the style of speech used by a wide range of trance channellers who channel multidimensional beings (see the discussion on Bashar, etc. in chapter 1). I found this style of speech equally appropriate for the voice of the seventh-dimensional oversoul, channelled by Kayla. Both dialects contain the occasional word in the speaker’s native tongue, italicised to emphasise their otherness. Ria Cheyne writes that the use of “alien” languages is a universal convention in science fiction, instantly recognised by readers: “that all alien utterances within sf texts signify in this way means that the concept (signified) of alienness is in sf represented by multiple, and potentially endless, signifiers” (Cheyne 392). I took advantage of this by embedding words and phrases of Saren—a “Pleiadian light language” recorded and translated by Maryann Rada (Nine’s Path)— throughout my work, mainly in the Terran sections and in the sections where Uncle Bill attempts to teach Jordy his “Miyayan” language. “Miyay-Miyay” is the Kamilaroi word for the Pleiadian star system and Uncle Bill’s character is both Kamilaroi and Miyayan. I did not create the Saren language and have no knowledge as to its validity, but it is a language that will be alien to most readers and therefore serves its purpose as a signifier.
Cheyne notes that many science-fiction writers include descriptions of their invented language, without including the language itself in the text. In this way, they take advantage of alien languages as a signifier of otherness and a tool for extraterrestrial world building and character development, while at the same time avoiding the difficulties of creating an authentic alien dialect. In Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”, Dr Banks realises that “for the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize” (Arrival 164). While Chiang devotes much of his narrative to discussing the features of the two distinct heptapod languages, spoken Heptapod A and written Heptapod B, and using the study of these languages as an integral part of both plot and character development, there is no notation of either language in the text. In this way, Chiang emphasises both the otherness and the complexity of the language without attempting to express its literal form.
Cheyne writes that a science-fiction author might also embed terrestrial languages in the dialect as a “kind of linguistic puzzle” so that “when this link to a natural language is recognized, the reader acquires extra information” (393). She gives as examples Frank Herbert’s use of Sanskrit and Latin roots in Dune Messiah (1969) and Anthony Burgess’s English/Russian “teenage jargon” in A Clockwork Orange (1962), each providing a connection with their relevant cultures and adding extra layers of meaning to the works (Cheyne 394). Robert Heinlein employs this technique in his 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, creating a Lunar dialect of English and Australian colloquialisms to enhance his prison colony setting: “Mike was a fair dinkum thinkum, sharpest computer you’ll ever meet” (3, loc. 60); and adding Russian and pseudo-Russian words, grammar (such as the omission of articles) and place names, together with allusions to the Bolsheviks, to enrich his revolutionary theme:
Must be a yearning deep in the human heart to stop the people from doing as they please. Rules, laws—always for other fellow […] Because not one of those people said: “Please pass this so that I won’t be able to do something I know I should stop.” Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them “for their own good”—not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it. (204, loc. 3154)
Using this technique, I embedded untranslated words of Dutch in Arya’s ninth-dimensional dialect, because the foreign words are unfamiliar to the average English reader and thus add to Arya’s otherness, and because the language connects Arya’s alien culture with a terrestrial culture, providing the subtle hint of a human origin story similar to Uncle Bill’s story of the Kamilaroi people and their Miyay-Miyay ancestors. I chose Dutch because it is an old language and offers a well-known proverb that fits nicely with Arya’s philosophy: “Leven en laten leven, as they are saying in the Ancient Lore”. Having promoted otherness, developed character, and added layers of meaning through the insertion of “alien” words, I then naturalised the text in both Arya’s dialogue and the seventh-dimensional sections by using formal punctuation and grammar, thereby encouraging the reader to accept the authenticity of the collective voices and the truth of their message.
Following this logic, it could be argued that the defamiliarisation of the other “unnatural” passages in both language and typography reduces their authenticity, but this is a risk that I, and presumably each of the writers mentioned above, was willing to take to create a specific effect. As with the manipulation of discourse-time, which I discuss in the next part of this chapter, I used these contrasting language techniques to unsettle the reader and encourage a sense of wonder. It is a fine line to tread: render the language too experimental and risk distracting the reader and drawing attention away from the narrative to the artifice of its construction; make it too familiar and the work loses its power to surprise the reader and open their mind to alternative realities.
Cheyne, Ria. “Created Languages in Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies, Nov. 2008, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 386–403.
Chiang, Ted. “Story of Your Life.” Arrival. Pan Macmillan UK, 2016, pp. 109–172.
Dillon, Sarah, editor. David Mitchell: Critical Essays. Gylphi, 20 April 2011. Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays.
Heinlein, Robert. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Kindle ed., Hodder & Stoughton, 14 Aug. 2014.
Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. Sceptre / Hodder and Stoughton, 2004.
—. “David Mitchell on Historical Fiction.” Daily Telegraph, 8 May 2010.
Rada, Maryann. Pleiadian Light Language: A Dictionary of the Saren Language. Nine’s Path. https://ninespath.com/nine/pleiadian-light-language/.
Robinson, Tasha. “We Asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can Science Fiction Save Us? How Good Utopian Novels Can Change Our Thinking about the World.” Polygon. 20 Oct. 2020.
Stocker, Bryony D. “‘Bygonese’: Is This Really the Authentic Language of Historical Fiction?” New Writing, vol. 9, no. 3, 25 June 2012, pp. 308–18