so Shire-talk is canonically a very different dialect of Westron than what Gondorians or Elves or whatever speak and some of the hobbits can code switch between the two and it’s extremely interesting to see how Tolkien portrays it
I’ve just gotten to the part where Frodo meets Faramir, and the difference between how he talks to Faramir and how he talks to Sam, for instance, is v noticable
with Sam he’s a lot more casual and even slightly more modern (for the value of 1954, not 2017) vs with Faramir where he switches to this very formal, quite archaic to our ears (“seven companions we had”)
and then Sam himself doesn’t seem comfortable speaking this prestige dialect (his style includes rather more general “vernacular” features common across regional nonliterary English dialects) – probably bc unlike Frodo he was not given the type of education that would lend itself to learning how to speak it comfortably – so there’s this clash between how Faramir talks to them and how Sam talks back
there’s also the bit where Theoden meets Merry and Pippin, and Merry greets him in very high formality, Pippin addresses Gimli casually bc they’re friends, then turns to Theoden and switches to the formal style, they both talk some more to him, and then after he’s gone Pippin turns to Merry and says Theoden was a “fine old fellow, very polite” (in the more casual style)
In that one scene you have a lot of style switching depending on the person they’re addressing and their status and relationship to the hobbits, but, for instance, Gimli’s sentence structure sounds more like the formal dialect even when he’s happily berating them and calling them villains, probably because he doesn’t use Shire-talk
basically: you can tell this dude was a linguist
#this is one of those things that authors doing non-fiction or historical fiction are frequently pretty good at imitating#in that they’re just replicating real-world usages of variance in tone and formality across different social groups#but more constructed-world fiction tends to muck up because that requires consciously thinking about it and making choices#instead of unconsciously absorbing it or studying actual usage #whiiiiich#one of the things that spoils a lot of genre fantasy for me is that the authors have no idea how to handle this#either it’s all super casual modern day usage with possibly a few characters doing bad imitations of formal archaism as a character cue#or it’s trying for high style and failing because the author is clearly uncomfortable and/or unfamiliar with the actual historical styles
@pinkpurlknitsnerdout, this is fascinating. I’ve never really thought to actively look for code-switching in literature, and while I’ve definitely noticed it in historical novels, I think all my experiences with high fantasy were before I even understood what code-switching was.
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