How do you write good, realistic dialog that gives each character their own unique voice?
Here's an exercise: write different characters in a piece saying the same general thing:
Character A: Hey, y'all! Glad to be here finally.
Character B: Hi, everyone! It's nice to see you all at last.
Character C: Yo, good to see ya, how've ya been? Not been waiting too long?
Character D: Hello, apologies for my lateness. Thanks for waiting for me.
Character E: Oh my God, so sorry I'm late. I'm here, I'm here. Hi. What'd I miss?
If you look at these, these characters:
Have different ways of referring to the people they're greeting
Have different ways of greeting them
Have different ways or asking after the people already there
Have different niceties they focus on: the apology, asking after the people's well-being, a formal greeting
Some of them apologize. Some don't.
Some of them put that apology and/or acknowledgment of their lateness up front. Some don't.
All of these things indicate different voices and different things about who the character is as a person, and how they communicate with someone! You can hear all of these characters very differently, you can probably picture them different even with no descriptions, you could probably pronounce these sentences different. But they're all saying basically the same thing in the same situation.
What you're looking to do here is craft an idiolect for a character Thanks, College, I actually have a paper on Uncle Iroh's idiolect I had to write for a class hanging out on my computer. I think that kind of thing helps: analyzing the way people and especially fictional characters speak.
You know how in character design, people want each character to have a distinct silhouette not just marked by colors or what not? You have to do the same thing with fictional characters. So analyzing the way fictional characters distinct themselves is important to being able to create a fictional character's speech pattern.
I said above that there's such a thing as "too realistic" and that's true. What you're trying to do when writing a character or writing dialogue is not to accurately imprint reality, but to create a facsimile of reality. Things like filler words and cursing reads much stronger on a page or on a screen than it feels when spoken aloud in real life. They should be pared back to make something that feels real without necessarily being real.
Advanced Level Stuff to consider:
Regionalisms for the same concept. Is it "soda" or "pop" or "soda pop" or "coke"? Is it a "freeway" or a "highway" or a "tollway" or a "turnpike" or a "interstate" or a "toll road" or what. You can do this with fictional worlds, you just gotta kind of decide what came from where.
People will pick up on specific words that give them euphony. Pick one or two for a character if you want to be intentional about it.
Linguistic mirroring. People talk like people they like. They admire them, and they change in subtle ways to be more similar to those people. Make a character talk like their mom or favorite teacher or best friend.
Register and code-switching. Real people will talk differently to different people in different social situations. Sometimes this is flattened in fictional characters, but it doesn't have to be. People are likely to shave off the swearing in front of kids or at work, they're likely to carefully pronounce things in front of people who are important to them.
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