Spark Your Dialogue with Regional Dialect

Attention to unique voices can enrich your writing

Eliza Doolittle by William Bruce Ellis Rankin. Compliments of WIkimedia Commons.

I am gullible.

When I was age nine or so, my father dug a large neatly edged rectangular hole parallel to our gravel driveway. Our family finances could now afford blacktop. He scraped and shoveled the gravel into his hole. As I watched him work, he stepped down into it and extracted a smooth oval stone and handed it to me. It nestled perfectly in my palm. “That’s a petrified rabbit egg, Diane. Keep ahold of that.” I kept my treasure on my bedroom shelf for years.

When I was four, at the first home I ever had, my Dad and I were on the back porch. Dad handed me a child-size shovel. “Diane, if you dig far enough, you’ll reach China.”

Excited by the realization of exotica under my very feet, I began to dig. I would not reach China until I was in my thirties. By plane.

I spent my childhood in southwestern Ohio. Until I left for college, except for a trip at fourteen to Niagara Falls, the farthest I traveled was sixty miles north to my uncle Leo’s home. My young life circled and spun in a very small arena. My mother’s family had lived in the area reaching back, in some cases, to the 1700s.

My speech — accent, sentence structure, and idioms — was pure Dayton, Ohio with an overlay of German from my…