Abstract
For professionals who strive to make their characters speak in a way that sounds true to their readership/audience and that is also informative of the characters’ story and identity, using the right resources is fundamental. Writers and performers display non-standard phonological and lexical variables (represented by the means of eye dialect in literature or performed accents in films) in order to index social, regional and ethnic traits as well as associated values. Performed voices inform the analyst about the society in which the media discourse takes place, about its relations to legitimate and non-standard ways of speaking, as well as to discriminated groups. In this chapter, I endeavour to demonstrate that, in fiction, dialect variation is a favoured practice in the depictions of the Other, but also that performances of rural/regional and social dialects have given way to stylizations of the ethnic Other.