A weekend full of business and drama delayed this page a bit … Besides, I had to redraw the last two panels like twenty times, even though they are so simple. Gah.

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Willie: A doont speek liek that, really. Bot A do speek liek this.
Aeron: I aktyuelly khev e werry strrongh Rrashn dyialict … Heh, no, I don’t …

Newcastle (Geordie) dialect is so nice. Though Willie’s accent is not very broad, I sometimes feel tempted to ‘show’ it more in the dialogue. But then, I would be obliged to do the same for all the other characters. And while that would be really awesome on some level, I would probably just get caught up in the joys of researching various accents ad infinitum.

So what I do now is try to use expressions that they, with their respective accents, would use, but write them out in standard English. Then those who know what such accents sound like can imagine it in their heads, and the rest can avoid feeling alienated …
The English translation of the first few chapters here is, of course, really bad, and some day I will go over it. (Probably when this prequel is done and I make a printed book …?)

I’ve linked to the International Dialects of English before, and here is a collection of Durham dialect word lists.

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By the way, where is Aeron’s Russian Male Pride? Shouldn’t he insist on doing the drilling? But since he grew up in the 20’s, maybe he thinks that would be uncomradely behaviour towards women. As in: “We must carry out serious work among the Komsomol masses with a view to educating them to have a comradely attitude towards girls. We need to struggle decisively against every type of contemptuous and indecent behaviour towards girls: ‘a mare is not a horse, a baba is not a person’. We must declare a decisive struggle with all kinds of obscene language, with hooliganism, with bawdy stories in the presence of girls, with all seemingly ‘comradely’ behaviour towards a girl that is designed only to ‘catch’ her. All such behaviour forces girls to flee from the union.”