I want to include a character in a webcomic who moved from France to America sometime after college. He knows english and is mostly fluent speaking, reading, and writing, but I want to still show that he’s french and that french is his first language without just saying it. This is my first time writing a bilingual character and I want to do it accurately and respectfully, please help! I could also use some fun idioms or phrases a french character might say. :)
3 Answers
French dude here.
In my opinion, here's a list of the stuff to avoid, and of the stuff you can do.
Probably avoid:
- Directly using French words in the middle of an English sentence. It doesn't matter how bad you are at a given language, nobody does that inadvertently. Poor writing too often relies on that for multilingual characters and I always find it ridiculous
- Stereotypes. Please don't give him a baguette or a croissant or make him the by-default-romantic character.
- Trying to "make him French" in any way at every scene. Most of the time, we're just fairly regular human beings, no need to wave our flag at all times.
- Translate french idioms literally as if the character is not aware that it will probably be confusing for English speakers. I honestly don't think we do that (but we might do a variation of that, see below)
What you can do:
- French names. First names will often be quite close to existing English names but with a different spelling. Last names will usually sound unmistakably French, especially if you put some accents in it, or use a nobiliary particle (such as "De La Boétie", but it implies he comes from what used to be an aristocratic family).
- We make mistakes. I probably made quite a few writing this up, which you could draw inspiration from. One way to slip in some realistic mistakes would be to look for a list of what we call "fake friends" (faux-amis): words that sound very similar in french and english but have very different meanings. For instance "supporter" is a French verb that means "to bear", but it sounds really close to "to support". If I'm tired, you'll sometimes catch me saying "I can't support this" when I really mean that I can't stand it. There are many examples like this that you could use by looking up a list. Don't use words that come up too frequently tho (like "actually"/"actuellement", it's a confusion that a fluent speaker could hardly make cause we use actually all the time)
- "La bise". We have this weird fucking way of saying hi to friendly chaps where we basically stick our cheeks together and pretend to kiss the air. Yeah, we actually do that, don't ask me why. And dumb as it sounds, I swear that sometimes when I meet a new person abroad who's really lively, I just naturally lean in and they immediately get confused as to why I'm trying to kiss them out of the blue. You could use that?
- That just naturally comes up in a conversation. You seem to want to avoid spelling it out, but tbh when you live abroad you hardly ever meet a new person without them asking about your origins in the first 5 minutes of conversation. Having a foreign character never mentioning his origin explicitly would actually not be super natural.
- Slang is tough. It's more of a broad foreigner trait, but we'll often sound like a character from the 70's when trying to sound "hip" (damn, I did it again)
- "As we say in my country...". Hm, ok, I do do that sometimes, when I'm chatting with someone just to kill time. When there's a french saying that has no English equivalent, or that gives me an opportunity for an untranslatable pun, I just kind of explain the french idiom. It's often funny to try and translate it literally, describe what it means and where it comes from cause it's usually highly cultural. I can't really make a list off the top of my head, there are very many, you'll have to do some research here as well.
- Cultural gap. The French dude might have no idea about that super famous US TV commercial your joke is referring to. He might have never heard about this famous chain of restaurants that you're inviting him to. And, believe me, he's only pretending to have the faintest idea where the US state you come from is located on a map.
- Have a French guy proofread you. He'll tell you what you got wrong. Cause it seems unavoidable that you'll get some things wrong.
What you can try (but could easily be fucked up):
- It's hard to transcribe an accent properly in a written form in a way that is neither offensive for a French reader, nor annoying to an English one. But there's a few stuff french folks do typically struggle with. You could get rid of some "h" since they are (pretty much) all silent in French and some people will indeed pronounce "home" as "ome". Same with "the" which can often sound like "ze". But this will definitely give the whole thing a much more cartoonish vibe, I don't know if that's what you're after. It will also make your character sound like a beginner to intermediate speaker.
There are about 500 questions on this site that ask "How do I write a character that is, does, or has something?" The answer to all these questions, and yours, is:
We cannot write your character for you and you need to do your research.
So find out what makes a French immigrant recognizable as French. His or her accent? French words they use? Their names? How they dress? What they eat? Their behavior? Or maybe most French won't be recognizable as French at all and those are just stereotypes?
You can begin by googling the questions you have and related terms. Probably someone on the web has written about French accents or French food or whatever differences between Americans and French they find remarkable. You can continue with watching movies or reading books about French characters in America. There are a lot of comedies about that that exaggerate the differences in the way that you probably want (famously the French exchange student that walks around naked in school). You can ask about French accents on French speaking internet forums (e.g. Reddit). And so on.
If you don't readily know how to do your research, that, too, is part of what you need to figure out and learn when you want to learn how to write. Again, it is not something we can hand to you all done and ready for you. You have to make that effort yourself.
Have fun!
It’s helpful if you know some French, but one of the best approaches to do this is through a linguistic calque: that is, you literally render how someone would say something in French in English. I only speak French as a joke, so I can’t be much help for French, but if I were doing a calque of Spanish, some of the things I would do would include:
- “meat” for beef. Spanish speakers generally use carne when referring to beef (as anyone who’s dined as a Mexican restaurant might have realized).
- “roof” for ceiling. Spanish uses techo for both roof and ceiling.
- “The”¹ in places where English would not use it, e.g., when possession is obvious, a Spanish speaker uses el/la rather than “my” or “her” etc., e.g., “I stubbed the toe getting out of bed.” Similarly, the definite article is used when speaking about abstract things, so “I like the beer” rather than “I like beer.”
Just a little bit of this goes a long way, so be careful of going too far.
One other thing that I’ve found when writing a non-native speaker is to avoid contractions. This can apply for a speaker of any language, as it provides a subtle awkwardness to the speaker’s dialogue that operates at an almost subconscious level.
Articles (the/a/an) are a kind of late addition to Indo-European languages and while the familiar Western European languages (English, Franch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Dutch) all use them, they do not always follow the same rules. On top of that, most European languages outside this list don’t use articles at all.²
Greek is perhaps the earliest adopter of articles among the Indo-European languages, but only has “the.” There is no indefinite article.
