Conventions for writing dialogues in the languages we know

[Pole, the]

I just wonder, what are the differences between the conventions regarding dialogues in books in various languages.

For example, in most books written in English, you'll see the conversation written that way:

I am bloody hungry, thought James.
“Do you have a sandwich for spare?” he asked Mary. “I have brought no food.”
“Sorry, I have nothing to eat”, she lied.

However, the Polish way is always like that:

„I am bloody hungry”, thought Jakub.
— Do you have a sandwich for spare? — he asked Maria. — I have brought no food.
— Sorry, I have nothing to eat. — she lied.

I have also seen something like that done in French in German texts. I don't know, however, how much of a starndard those are.

German:

I am bloody hungry, thought Jakob.
»Do you have a sandwich for spare?« he asked Maria. »I have brought no food.«
»Sorry, I have nothing to eat«, she lied.

French:

« I am bloody hungry », thought Jacques.
— Do you have a sandwich for spare ? he asked Marie. I have brought no food.
— Sorry, I have nothing to eat, she lied.

What are your opinions?
What do you find the most aesthetically pleasing? What other conventions do you know of? What do you use when writing in your conlangs?

[linguoboy]

At the moment I'd reading a French text (Marcel Aymé's Contes du chat perché) and the only punctuation he uses for his dialogues is the comma. To wit:

I am bloody hungry, thought James.
Do you have a sandwich for spare? he asked Mary. I have brought no food.
Sorry, I have nothing to eat, she lied.

Frequently I have to reread a line to determine whether it contains a direct quotation or not. I find it annoying, but not as annoying as the convention in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall of using only "he" to identify lines spoken by the protagonist, presumably so she wouldn't have to repeat the name "Cromwell" a couple hundred times. More than once it caused me to lose the thread of an entire dialogue and have to start again at the top.

[sirdanilot]

I think the 'down' apostrophes „ are a bit old-fashioned in Dutch, but still commonly used. If I type a text I would do quotations as in English. These are not things I really notice when reading so I'll look in a Dutch book for you. I think if you look in an older text you only see the 'down' and 'up' apostrophes (down at beginning, up at the end of the quotation).

In this book I have here (Turks Fruit from Jan Wolkers), he just uses single quotation marks. The same goes for another random book I opened. So I think this is the convention today:

I am bloody hungry, thought James.
'Do you have a sandwich for spare?' he asked Mary. 'I have brought no food.'
'Sorry, I have nothing to eat', she lied.

[finlay]

Books printed in the UK use single quotation marks too (if you have the UK and US editions of the same book you tend to find they differ in that one respect). If you have a character quoting another character, they tend to put the quotation within the quotation in double quotation marks, eg:

'He said "I love you" to me yesterday,' said Mary.

Thoughts are a bit of a free-for-all – I've seen them put in italics, no punctuation, or quotation marks the same as speech.

[GreenBowTie]

the dash-style quotation system is really hard for me to read, when i encountered the sample in the LCK book of an extended dialogue i could not figure out who was talking in basically any line that didn't feature one character addressing the other by name

[Qwynegold]

In Swedish and Finnish, there are two types that are common:

“I'm bloody hungry”, thought Jakob.
“Do you have a sandwich for spare?”, he asked Maria. “I have brought no food.”
“Sorry, I have nothing to eat”, she lied.

I am bloody hungry, thought James.
–Do you have a sandwich for spare?, he asked Mary. –I have brought no food.
–Sorry, I have nothing to eat, she lied.

There are no established conventions for thoughts.

[finlay]

So are you all deliberately putting the commas outside the quotation marks? My teachers were very insistent that they go inside the quotation marks when I was at school.

[ęzo]

There’re at least two common conventions for Serbocroatian:

„I’m bloody hungry“, thought Jakob.
„Do you have a sandwich for spare?“ he asked Maria. „I have brought no food.“
„Sorry, I have nothing to eat“, she lied.
„Did you say, ‘I have nothing’?“ he asked.

»I’m bloody hungry«, thought Jakob.
»Do you have a sandwich for spare?« he asked Maria. »I have brought no food.«
»Sorry, I have nothing to eat«, she lied.
»Did you say, ›I have nothing‹?« he asked.

The former’s more common in Serbian texts, the latter in Croatian. In more recent texts the dash style has been getting popular, too, and you’ll also see the English style used online (due to lack of keyboard support?).

For æsthetic reasons, I tend to use

I’m bloody hungry, thought Jakob.
»Do you have a sandwich for spare?« he asked Maria. »I have brought no food.«
»Sorry, I have nothing to eat«, she lied.
»Did you say, ›I have nothing‹?« he asked.

in most languages, English and (Latin- or Cyrillic-alphabet) conlangs included.

[Pole, the]

So are you all deliberately putting the commas outside the quotation marks? My teachers were very insistent that they go inside the quotation marks when I was at school.

Even when it makes no sense at all? Are there any other countries that do it that way, apart from the US?

[KathTheDragon]

England does.

[kanejam]

So are you all deliberately putting the commas outside the quotation marks? My teachers were very insistent that they go inside the quotation marks when I was at school.

Even when it makes no sense at all? Are there any other countries that do it that way, apart from the US?

I was taught the same, punctuation always inside the quote marks.

The thing that strikes me about French (and maybe others) is that, whether quotation marks or the dash system or guillemets (which I actually don't think I've seen much outside of indirect quotes in newspapers) are used, whoever's saying the dialogue is nestled in there with the speech:

«Do you have a sandwich for spare? he asked Maria. I have brought no food.»

[Zaarin]

So are you all deliberately putting the commas outside the quotation marks? My teachers were very insistent that they go inside the quotation marks when I was at school.

Even when it makes no sense at all? Are there any other countries that do it that way, apart from the US?

I was taught commas and periods always go inside, colons and semicolons always go outside, and question marks and exclamation points go inside if part of the quote and outside if not*.

*I.e.: "Stop there!" he said. vs. "Did he say 'stop there'?"

[finlay]

Well in the British usage we distinguish quoted speech and other forms of quotes, I believe. In speech, the quote would technically end in a full stop but this is changed to a comma to run into the rest of the sentence, if that makes sense. If you're actually quoting someone or something, you should keep the original punctuation. It's just I'm seeing some people reporting that, for instance, Swedish uses the same style as English sometimes, but the commas are in the wrong place, and like, I'm gonna have to see photographic proof that they would really be typeset outside the quotation mark in a real book, or if the poster above just hasn't noticed. To be fair, a properly typeset book should have them almost vertically aligned.

[Pole, the]

Then it is another novelty for me. There is no such rule in Polish.

[GreenBowTie]

personally i was always taught to keep the punctuation inside the quotes (i'm in the US), including a comma or period that may not have originally been there, but i've been putting them outside the quotes instead since i was a teenager, because it just makes more sense that way

[Zaarin]

personally i was always taught to keep the punctuation inside the quotes (i'm in the US), including a comma or period that may not have originally been there, but i've been putting them outside the quotes instead since i was a teenager, because it just makes more sense that way

Out of curiosity why do you feel this makes more sense? The only time I even hesitate is in lists of titles wherein there is already punctuation (for example, episode titles like "Dr. Bashir, I Presume?" look awkward when you have to follow that question mark with a comma to say nothing of the comma already in the title). Otherwise, to me American rules make perfect sense.

[GreenBowTie]

because it's a quote, so i'm not gonna add something into it that wasn't there to begin with (unless i put it in brackets)

[finlay]

Just for comparison, Japanese uses the corner brackets 「…」to enclose a quote. For a quote within a quote, it's 『』. They don't have any punctuation at the end unless it's a question mark or exclamation mark, which are common in modern Japanese but probably not in older works. What's the most different is that they seem to start a new line (or, well, column) for who said the thing. Thoughts, not so sure. I'm still not really a good enough level to read a whole book, so this is just a bit of guesswork for now.

But it looks something like this, I think:

「余計なサンドがあるの？僕は食べ物を持って来なかった」
ジャックはマリーに聞いた。
「ごめんね、食べ物はない」
彼女はウソをついた。

「Do you have a sandwich for spare? I have brought no food」
Jacques asked Marie.
「Sorry, I have nothing to eat」
She lied.

[Qwynegold]

Well in the British usage we distinguish quoted speech and other forms of quotes, I believe. In speech, the quote would technically end in a full stop but this is changed to a comma to run into the rest of the sentence, if that makes sense. If you're actually quoting someone or something, you should keep the original punctuation. It's just I'm seeing some people reporting that, for instance, Swedish uses the same style as English sometimes, but the commas are in the wrong place, and like, I'm gonna have to see photographic proof that they would really be typeset outside the quotation mark in a real book, or if the poster above just hasn't noticed. To be fair, a properly typeset book should have them almost vertically aligned.

Actually, I don't know what the rule is in Swedish. I just put question marks and exclamation marks inside the quote because they're "part of the quote" as they modify the manner in which the quote is said, but other interpunctuation I have outside. When we have this , he said. thing, the comma is not part of the quote, because the quote would have "ended"* with a period if it wasn't for the he said. *Periods and commas are not heard in speech, so therefore they can't be part of the quote.

[finlay]

That's the most nonsensical reasoning ever (you can't actually "hear" the individual letters in words either but you're happy to spell them out, after all), but fine. I'll have to see evidence that real published books do it that way before I believe you, though.

[KathTheDragon]

My reasoning for putting the punctuation inside the quotes is that you're quoting a sentence: I can see you. > "I can see you," he said. The change from a full stop to a comma is because the quote no longer terminates the sentence. You do, however, still use a full stop if the 'he said' goes before, as: He said, "I can see you." Whether or not you put a comma before the quote, as I did, is probably a matter of style.

[Zaarin]

My reasoning for putting the punctuation inside the quotes is that you're quoting a sentence: I can see you. > "I can see you," he said. The change from a full stop to a comma is because the quote no longer terminates the sentence. You do, however, still use a full stop if the 'he said' goes before, as: He said, "I can see you." Whether or not you put a comma before the quote, as I did, is probably a matter of style.

This. Though most formal styles like MLA, Chicago, APA, what have you, require the comma before the quotation mark. Informally I occasionally put them outside in cases like I mentioned before that involve lists of titles that have punctuation within the title (or more often I just use semicolons which go outside anyway), otherwise I tend to follow the formal rules.

[KathTheDragon]

If your quote is a list of titles, it's unlikely to be quoting direct speech. So, the rules for quoting direct speech don't apply, unless it actually is direct speech.

[Valdeut]

There is a fairly authoritative style guide for writing Swedish: "Svenska skrivregler" by Språkrådet (The Language Council of Sweden), now part of Institutet för språk och folkminnen (The Institute for Language and Folklore). The recommendations in this guide are mostly followed in practice, at least in Sweden, but I would assume in Finland as well.

When it comes to dialogue, there are multiple options given in "Svenska skrivregler", and they are all used in practice.

One of the most common way to write dialogue is probably this:

I am bloody hungry, thought James.
– Do you have a sandwich for spare? he asked Mary. I have brought no food.
– Sorry, I have nothing to eat, she lied.
– Did you say ”I have nothing”? he asked.

The quotation dash ("replikstreck", "talstreck", "anföringsstreck", "pratminus") should be a single en-dash (shorter than the dash used in English) and there should be a space after the dash (unlike in English). Preferably, the dialogue should be indented even when indentation is not otherwise used to mark a new paragraph. The quotation dash is only used for speech, not for thoughts. The thought should not be italicized either.

In this case, double quotation marks are used for quotes-within-quotes.

It is slightly akward to have two quotes (or an interrupted quote) on the same line so a dash is sometimes used in the middle of a line (always an en-dash, always with spaces on both sides):

I am bloody hungry, thought James.
– Do you have a sandwich for spare? he asked Mary. – I have brought no food.
– Sorry, I have nothing to eat, she lied.
– Did you say ”I have nothing”? he asked.

"Svenska skrivregler" does not mention this usage and it is presumably somewhat non-standard.

The other common way in Swedish is to use quotation marks:

I am bloody hungry, thought James.
”Do you have a sandwich for spare?” he asked Mary. ”I have brought no food.”
”Sorry, I have nothing to eat”, she lied.
”Did you say ’I have nothing’?” he asked.

Swedish uses identical quotation marks to begin and end a quote: ”. Apart from that, I think the rules are similar to common British usage. The comma goes outside the quotation marks. Question marks and exclamation marks that "belong to the quote" go inside the quotation marks, however, and in that case no comma is used. And the final full stop normally goes inside the quotation marks. Generally, having punctuation on both sides of a quotation mark is avoided.

Single quation marks (still, only one type: ’) are used for quotes-within-quotes in this case. They are not used for base level quotes.

Again, thought do not take quotation marks and italics are not used.

Both the dash-style and the quotation mark-style is also commonly used with a colon:

James thought: I am bloody hungry.
He asked Mary:
– Do you have a sandwich for spare? I have brought no food.
She lied:
– Sorry, I have nothing to eat.
He asked:
– Did you say ”I have nothing”?

James thought: I am bloody hungry.
He asked Mary: ”Do you have a sandwich for spare? I have brought no food.”
She lied: ”Sorry, I have nothing to eat.”
He asked: ”Did you say ’I have nothing’?”

Finally, guillemets ("vinkelcitationstecken", "gåsögon") may be used in place of the normal quotation marks. This style is not that common and I think it's mostly found in fiction. There are actually two options for using guillemets, they may be »right pointing» or »inwards pointing«. The former is more traditional but the latter is increasingly common. Otherwise, the rules are the same as for normal quotation marks (single guillemets are used in place of single quotation marks).

I am bloody hungry, thought James.
»Do you have a sandwich for spare?» he asked Mary. »I have brought no food.»
»Sorry, I have nothing to eat», she lied.
»Did you say ›I have nothing›?» he asked.

I am bloody hungry, thought James.
»Do you have a sandwich for spare?« he asked Mary. »I have brought no food.«
»Sorry, I have nothing to eat«, she lied.
»Did you say ›I have nothing‹?« he asked.

———

In Swedish and Finnish, there are two types that are common:

“I'm bloody hungry”, thought Jakob.
“Do you have a sandwich for spare?”, he asked Maria. “I have brought no food.”
“Sorry, I have nothing to eat”, she lied.

I am bloody hungry, thought James.
–Do you have a sandwich for spare?, he asked Mary. –I have brought no food.
–Sorry, I have nothing to eat, she lied.

There are no established conventions for thoughts.

I must disagree, I don't think those are the most common conventions in Swedish. See above.

[Valdeut]

It's just I'm seeing some people reporting that, for instance, Swedish uses the same style as English sometimes, but the commas are in the wrong place, and like, I'm gonna have to see photographic proof that they would really be typeset outside the quotation mark in a real book, or if the poster above just hasn't noticed. To be fair, a properly typeset book should have them almost vertically aligned.

Here's an excerpt from a popular Swedish book with a lot of dialogue. It uses quotation marks rather than dashes:
http://www.smakprov.se/smakprov.php?isb ... 45&l=bokus
(Flash required, I think).

As you can see, the comma does indeed go outside the quotation marks. But unlike in Qwynegold's post, no comma is used when the quote ends in a question mark or exclamation mark.