I just read a fic where a character who canonically speaks SAE

[conuly]

suddenly comes out with the "needs washed" construction.

As always, I find it totally fascinating how people with this construction in their dialect have no idea that it isn't universal. It isn't universal, guys, it is very much regional. As far as I know, it comes from one specific place in the British Isles and is found only in parts of the Anglosphere heavily settled by people from that place.

And for some reason, people who otherwise knows that all sorts of regionalisms in their speech are regionalisms are totally baffled when you tell them that this is one of them. They suggest there's no other way to say things without that construction. They are confused when you point out that every television show they've ever watched and every book they've ever read has dozens of examples of people saying the same thing, but in Standard English - the dog needs to be washed, the book needs to be put away, and so on.

I didn't say anything to this author, but I'm watching the comments in case somebody else does. I usually find linguistic diversity interesting on its own, but when it comes to this particular construction I find the fact that the speakers who have it have no idea to be much more fascinating.

Comments

[james]

This reminds me of how annoyed I get at the fanfic writers writing 9-1-1 fic and the writers are British (fans of Oliver Stark, who is British but plays an American on the show.) They don't make any effort to make their stories sound American -- where in narration or dialogue. And I shout at the clouds like an old lady, because in MY day, writing fic for The Professionals, we tried very hard to make sure our British characters sounded British! We had Britpickers! We would be ashamed to post a story that sounded like an American had written it!

And here are all these fanfic writers saying Buck was sat on the couch as the lorry drove by and I want to shout at them.

[conuly]

I seem to recall a lot of complaining, back in the day, of people who refused to Brit pick or use betas.

[cimorene]

Yeah, they were definitely there shortly after 2000. But the expectation to get fic brit picked or American picked was also common, though not universal!

I would go through a community or archive systematically back in the early 2000s and would find a lot of these mistakes, but also a lot of mentions of the -pickers in author notes, either to thank them or apologize for not getting one. So at least there was a large portion of the writing fandom aware of this expectation and affected by it at least far enough to apologize for its lack.

When I was reading Stranger Things last summer, in contrast - and it's also a heavily UK teenager fandom, not sure why - the body of discourse in author notes was much different. There were few mentions of betas or dialect pickers (though these were still present sometimes!) and a huge number references to posting right away, in the middle of the night or on their phones or whatever, to explain a lack of spellchecking and other hasty errors. A lot of people will note that they don't have time to proofread yet and will post anyway and promise to come back and do it soon, which is a new type of note I don't remember seeing very often at all in the 00s. And also there are a lot of unapologetic notices that they simply don't want to be bothered proofreading, or spellchecking, or getting anyone to beta or dialect pick... but I think this is also linked to the fact that younger and newer fans often seem to have trouble finding betas at all. Many of them don't have community interactions anywhere in any practical sense and get all their fannish stuff from Tumblr and AO3, which is not conducive to the kinds of community building you got on lj.