One thing I really hate when I’m reading a book is when the author choses to italicize non-English words in the text.

Here’s my thinking:

  1. I am a native English speaker.
  2. I recognize that that isn’t an English word.
  3. I don’t need it pointed out to me like I’m stupid.
  4. Making it so obvious makes the use of another language seem strange when in the context of the story it would be normal.

Is it just me that this bothers? It gives me the vibe of Americans going to Mexico and then getting mad that people are speaking Spanish.

I looked up some information on why this is done. This post from The Narrative Craft has a lot of good information. These are the rules according to the Chicago Manual of Style.

Common standards at present are:

  • No italics for proper nouns in other languages
  • No italics for words from other languages found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary (US English) or the Oxford English dictionary (UK).

They go on to discuss that some people disagree with this. Hello! That’s me!

I hope that more authors move away from this to normalize the use of other languages in character dialogue in their books.