A week spent in Venice reminds me how different the language sounds from the Roman Italian I learnt when I was first studying a decade ago. It's not just the accent. In some areas you can still hear the original language, Veneto, which isn't a dialect at all, but a completely separate tongue.

So how should a writer reflect accents and foreign languages in a book? Indeed, should you at all?

Ernest Hemingway made a brave attempt at anglicising Spanish in <em>For Whom the Bell Tolls.</em> Great book but his efforts don't work for me. Spanish is one of the many languages which distinguishes between the singular and plural second person. In English we simply say 'you'. In Spanish singular and plural are different, and just to complicate matters there are different words for formal and informal too. I won't bring in how modern Italian handles the second person formal here because your head will start spinning.

And mine does when I read again how Hemingway handles this in the book. He resurrects the old English second person singular 'thou' and puts it in the mouth of a Spanish character. Like this, 'It is not that thou art stupid. Thou art simply deaf.'

It gets worse.

<!--more-->

He also uses Spanish curses literally, or tries to until the sensitive editors of the day marched in with a red pen. A frequent curse in the book is '<em>me cago en la leche</em>'. This translated literally as, 'I shit in the milk'. Except, of course, readers in those days couldn't handle the word 'shit'. So what appeared in the original was, 'I obscenity in the milk.' Which sounds rather worse to me but there you go.

This is a wonderful book. You should read it. But these linguistic contortions get in the way for me. They're only there because the writer is trying to make a point about anglicising a language which, at times, refused to play ball.

Here are some other ways of tackling this problem that I find less than satisfactory (though they may be fine for you).
<ul>
	<li>Throwing known common foreign words into a sentence as some kind of flag. So a Spanish character will frequently ask for a cup of coffee and add, 'por favor'. Shouldn't we know he's Spanish already? Does the fact he can say please tell us anything?</li>
	<li>Accents. 'Pleeze Meester Fawlty. I no had done nerthink!' Sorry but accents just don't work for me at all. They're hard to read and can very quickly become tedious.</li>
</ul>
When I first started writing the Costa books I did attempt to imitate the spoken rhythm of Italian. The language you hear every day in cafes and on buses is full of slang, some of it quite obscene, compressed, rapid-fire, colloquial. There's a strong argument for representing that in spoken English as modern colloquial American, slang-ridden dialogue. And I did this for a couple of books until I thought: why? Does anyone get the connection except me? Surely I'm just putting up speed bumps in the road that will make readers think, 'Why do these Italians speak as if they come from New York or somewhere?'

So now they just speak English. I try to do some subtle things with contractions and the absence of them (which I will write about some other time). But I just want them to speak normally, naturally, without any 'thous' or other such interjections that end up making people scratch their heads.

When they were making the movie of <em>Semana Santa</em> I flew to the set in Seville, solely as an observer, and talked to people. One of the actors, an American, asked me, 'What kind of accent should I play this character in?'

What sort of accent do you fancy, I asked. Spanish, the actor said, since the character was Spanish.

I thought for a moment and then said, without thinking, 'But the Spanish don't speak Spanish with a Spanish accent.' Which didn't go down too well. What I meant, I think, was this. We live in a very international world. It's no longer unusual to bump into someone from the other side of the planet while waiting at the supermarket checkout. Being foreign is no longer special. It's just part of everyday life. So I try to let my characters speak as people first and Italians second. And while I will use Italian words from time to time it's usually in a context in which they can be easily understood (if Peroni is munching on a porchetta panini most of us can guess what it contains). You shouldn't have to buy a dictionary of a foreign grammar primer to read a novel.