This week: Accents Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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The accent of one's birthplace remains in the mind and in the heart as in one's speech.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld
My own dreams fortunately came true in this great state. I became Mr. Universe; I became a successful businessman. And even though some people say I still speak with a slight accent, I have reached the top of the acting profession.
—Arnold Schwarzenegger
There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower.
—David Crystal |
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Many stores feature characters from different backgrounds. This is certainly not limited to Fantasy, but works in this genre often use fictional cultures and settings. This presents a challenge for the writer: how do we show the differences between these characters of diverse origin?
There are many ways, through description, their actions, and so on, but one vehicle for this is dialogue. Here in what we confidently call the real world, we have many different languages, and some of the more widely-spoken languages, including English, have numerous regional variations in pronunciation, structure, cadence, and idioms. And that's only considering native speakers; those who learn other languages usually speak them with a discernible accent.
There's no reason why a fantasy setting shouldn't have a similar range of ways of speaking. But while we're all familiar with many different real-world accents, how do you portray them in a story?
Unless you're setting the story in some analogue of our present world, you're already performing a translation, from whatever language your character speaks to a modern, real language. I'm going to go ahead and assume that language is English for the sake of this discussion. English has a particular set of words and phrases commonly used, and you generally want some approximation of colloquial English so your readers understand what's going on.
So you can extend that concept to a character with a different origin. You might use some version of a real-world accent in your writing, and perhaps they don't understand all the idioms, like "catch a cold" or "give someone the cold shoulder." And they'd have idioms of their own that perhaps don't translate well.
Puns, for example, hardly ever translate between languages. And yet I've seen them in fantasy stories set on entire other worlds where English doesn't exist. I can forgive that, though, because puns are fun.
There are some pitfalls to watch out for, however. Too much emphasis on the accent can make their dialogue incomprehensible, such as when some writers try to portray a Cockney accent. Sometimes, that's what you want, if the dialogue would also be incomprehensible to the POV character. If so, make it clear that they don't understand it, either.
The more important thing to avoid, in my opinion at least, is that you don't turn the accent into a stereotype. Such as the aforementioned Cockney accent, or a deep Irish brogue, or a character that can't pronounce the "r" sound. Speaking of which, there are at least two dozen ways to pronounce that letter, and not all of them lend themselves to text transcription. The French r is a softer version of the German/Hebrew/Scottish/Arabic "ch" while many Spanish speakers trill it, and New Englanders often famously drop it entirely; and yet, in text, it's almost always simply r or rr.
Vowels have even more variation. E, for example, can sound like we call it, ee, or it could be more like a long A, something like a short I as in American pronunciations of "been," short as in "set," silent, or hardly pronounced at all. It's not always ee-sy to capture the nuances of vowel pronunciation in text. Look up "The Great Vowel Shift " for a fascinating, if somewhat technical, history of vowel pronunciation in English.
You don't have to be a linguist like Tolkien was to imagine worlds with different languages. But a little bit of knowledge in the area can help. |
Some Fantasy for you—in English.
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Fantasy: August 24, 2022 Issue [#11524]
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