So, I’ve seen this problem when people want to write characters from a culture other than their own:
- They know that those characters speak a different dialect than they do
- And they want to convey this
- But they don’t realize the dialect actually has a rich grammar and other idioms and conventions
- So they end up just using a lot of stereotypes, or mis-using well-known attributes of the dialect
- For instance, white authors who want to write characters who speak AAVE often misuse “be” as an indicator (by replacing “is” with “be” at random times rather than learning how “be” actually functions grammatically and writing it correctly.)
It’s important not to do that. If you want to write dialogue in a particular dialect, it’s important to actually learn that dialect so that you can write it correctly.