Bilingual characters are, in my humble opinion, awesome. Who doesn’t love it when the romantic heroine throws around some key Italian phrases to show off how sophisticated she is? Who doesn’t get thrown for a loop when the innocuous secondary character steps in and saves the big business deal with some #flawless Chinese? Plus, using multiple languages adds richness and complexity to your worlds, and provides important character clues, and is just really cool. Language is eXCITING EVERYBODY GET E X C I T E D W I T H M E
(ahem)
If you want to write a bilingual character but aren’t feeling confident in your foreign-language skills, good news! Writing a bilingual character requires basically no foreign language ability. You can use it if you want, but unless you’re writing a bilingual book, there’s no real need for foreign words.
Since you can’t subtitle a book, anything that isn’t said in English is usually just written in italics to clue the reader in, like so:
“I don’t hate you,” she said impatiently. “I love you. And I’m afraid to let you see that.”
“Huh?” Her friend said. Tragically, she had studied German in school and did not understand a word of Spanish.
See? No Spanish necessary. The characters get to experience all of the drama and tension, and your readers get to revel in it.
If you’re feeling mean and want to shut the reader out of the conversation (or if you just want to flex your fabulous polyglot muscles), you can write key phrases in the target language, like so:
“I don’t hate you,” she said impatiently. “Te quiero. Y tengo miedo de dejarte ver eso.”
“Huh?” Her friend said. Tragically, she had studied German in school and did not understand a word of Spanish.
If someone couldn’t read Spanish, they’d have no idea what was going on. Dropping a few phrases in the target language can be a great way to keep readers in the dark.
If you aren’t bilingual, or you are but just don’t use your second language very much, here are four tips to help add a dash of realism to your bilingual characters:
- If two characters speak the same language, they’ll use their mutual language to talk about other people. There’s something about knowing that you can’t be understood that brings out everyone’s inner gossip.
- Bilingual people typically pick a language and stick with it. It’s tiring and confusing to switch back and forth between languages all the time. Unless your character is very tired, very angry, very drunk, or just very determined to be confusing, they’re not going to switch between languages mid-sentence.
- Idioms, proverbs, and slang words are basically bilingual Kryptonite. An otherwise fluent speaker who can talk about business, science, and culture can be rendered helpless by a simple expression. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? What eggs? What basket? I DON’T HAVE A BASKET. WE WERE TALKING ABOUT COLLEGE APPLICATIONS, BRENDA.
- You aren’t the same level of “smart” in every language. Unless they’re a native speaker both languages, there’s a strong, strong chance that your character is going to be “smarter” (i.e. have a better vocabulary and an easier time formatting complex sentences) in one language than in the other. If your character is speaking in their second or third language, keep in mind that they might be struggling to articulate just how smart and aware they really are.
Do you have any bilingual characters? How many languages do they speak? Are any of the languages fictional?
Actually I have a trilingual character in my WIP. Two of the languages are fictional, because aliens. But because aliens and a multispecies colony where neither species can cspeak the others language, the entire society is bilingual. Then part way in the protag is forced to learn a third for plot reasons (Very good plot reasons)
That’s so awesome!! How much have you developed the languages? Do they have an established grammar/syntax? A working vocabulary?
(I’m late :3 )
I have three bilingual characters. One speaks Japanese/English, one Russian/English, and the last one speaks Russian/Japanese/English and a fictional language.
I’m very proud of my fictional language. I always thought it sounded so pretty.
That’s amazing! I love that you have a quadrilingual character alongside your bilingual ones. How did you create your fictional language? Did you use real ones as a basis or just create it out of thin air?
As a bilingual person myself(I was born and raised in The Netherlands, living in the US since 2009),I can tell you the following, which might help you in adding details to your bilingual person:
the more tired I am, the stronger my Dutch accent will be. I might even throw in some Dutch words. Or catch myself starting to say a Dutch word and struggle for the translation.
When you learn a different language, the last thing you will get a hang of are the finer details, like proverbs and sayings. I’ve had several occasions where I literally translated a Dutch saying into English. And got some confused looks. (When someone told me they’re the youngest in the family, I said “Ah, so you’re the Benjamin”. “Huh??” So yeah, that is a Dutch saying that doesn’t exist as such in English”.)
It also works the other way, where my husband can throw out a saying or references to something typical from his time growing up that makes no sense to me.
Hopes this helps 🙂
These are great! Thanks for adding to the fact pile 🙂
I have a bilingual character and a trilingual one. Their world has three major languages, but two are the most commonly used. Actually, my setting has two worlds and a spiritual realm, so I ended up having to describe the otherworldly language and have a spirit-language on top of that.
I’m really into linguistics, so developing the three main languages is like my pet project. I must admit it’s rather like a pet I shut in a box and barely look at, but I can’t get rid of it…
So it’s like a pet rock then 😂 I’m the same with worldbuilding. It’s technically a useful thing but I spend way more time thinking about sky pirate gender politics than is strictly necessary
Hiya, I’m a bit late to the party!
I’m writing a story and my main character is German. She was born and raised in Germany before she moved to America at age 12. Since moving to America my character hasn’t been to Germany much but still speaks German with her mother. How do you think I should show that she is bilingual?
I’m not bilingual myself but I am trying to learn how to speak Cree. Anyway, I thought I’d ask and see if you had some extra tips? Thanks in advance!
Wow, Cree? That’s so cool!! Is there a particular reason you want to learn?
Regarding your character, I’d say have her speak German in the home and English everywhere else. Something I’ve seen parents do is pretend that they can’t speak English, in order to encourage their native language in the home, so you might have her mother deliberately ignore anything said in English. You could also have your character refer to less-well-known or childish pop culture things by their German name, rather than their English one (for example, Pippi Longstocking is Pippi Langstrumpf in Germany, and what are the chances that someone told your character that?) just to show that, as a non-native speaker, she’s still learning the finer details.
Hi! I’m super late to this party, but this was super helpful. I have a question, though: I have a bilingual family in my story, but one of the brothers is a prodigy in languages, and I was wondering how many languages is too many? I think he speaks five or six now, Latin being one, and he’s seventeen. It’s a hobby for him to learn languages and I’m not sure how many I should give him.
His dad is a scientist (where the Latin comes from) and his mom is from Germany (so German is the language all of the brothers speak).
Hi! I’m really late to this post, but it was super helpful. I’m writing a bilingual family, and I only know English (lol oof). So I have a question: one of my characters is a seventeen-year-old guy who is a language prodigy, and learning languages is a hobby he loves. German is the language the whole family can speak, and he learned Latin from his dad, who is a scientist. So far he knows five or six languages, and I was wondering if that’s too much. Any suggestions?
Yay, I’m glad it was helpful! And I don’t think that five or six languages is too many. I mean, I’m no language prodigy and I’m learning my fourth language 😂 I’m assuming that your character speaks German with his relatives and Latin with his dad, but does he use any of his other languages in daily life (e.g. for school, business, preparing to travel, etc)? If he does, that gives a context for him to use his other languages in the book.
If he’s just learning languages for fun, and doesn’t really have a chance to use them in his daily life, that’s 1000% valid!! If that’s the case, I’d suggest having him talk about why he likes each language. I’m guessing he’s a bit of a linguistics nerd anyways, but do any of his languages relate to his heritage? Does he like the grammatical features (things like clusivity, or time independence) that aren’t featured in his native langauge? Does the language sound particularly musical or funny to his ears? Are there unique sounds that he’s put a lot of effort into learning to make (e.g. the clicks in Xhosa), or a new alphabet that he worked really hard to master? Does he watch a lot of foreign films and want to free himself from subtitles? Does he feel that, in a globalised world, it’s his responsibility to learn as many languages as he can? Is language-learning a form of activism against “bully languages” like English, Spanish, and Chinese (i.e. languages that are becoming so common that they’re threatening the health of minority languages)?
TL;DR your boi can learn as many languages as he wants, because language learning is fun and a pretty popular hobby, but it’s always good to give it some form of context so that his amazing polyglot-ness doesn’t smack the reader out of nowhere 😊
I’m writing a bilingual supporting character. She’s Hispanic and her family is from Mexico. I was wondering if anyone had and knowledge of some Spanish sayings I could use or a common mistake Hispanic people make when speaking English. If you can’t tell I’m not around many bilingual people so I need all the help I can get.
This post was incredibly useful, thank you! I’m currently writing the first draft of my first novel; it’s a piece of historical fiction following a girl with both German and English heritage during Nazi control of Germany. While I speak quite a bit of German I am not yet fluent, so your tips will be very useful!