Worse still, all dialog innately bends towards your own mode of speech (or at least, written speech), meaning that there's a risk from the start of all your characters sounding the same. One way many authors have tried to stir the waters and keep things from becoming too uniform is by giving one or more characters a unique accent.
Which is a very dangerous endeavor.
Accents have the potential to add a real spice to your dialog. A light Scottish brogue is not only appealing to many ears, it can add notes to a brash or comedic character that the words themselves may not. A harsh Russian edge lends itself to everything from comedy (see Nosh in Drive) to animosity (thank you, Ian Fleming). A rich Spanish accent? That should go without saying.
Of course, all of the above enter into the area of overused, but before we even get that far, there's a larger concern: how do you write sound?
The idea may sound ludicrous: we write sound all the time. Every letter has a sound. But with an accent, you have to translate from written, "proper" English into the modified, slanted version your speaker is using. That comes in three forms:
- tonal variations (shifting the way the words, especially vowels, sound),
- structure (dropping articles, dropping contractions, etc), and
- idioms (word choice, slang and other things that simply don't translate)
Representing those in text is another matter entirely. The first is the hardest, so we'll start there.
Native speakers of almost any other language tend to struggle a bit with English. Depending on which language they're coming from, the structure or the sounds may be what trips them up, but we tend to hear it either way.
Even within English, there are several dialects all their own, including regional (Oxford, cockney, Irish, Scottish, Australian, but also Brooklyn New York, the Deep South, Texas, the mid-west, New Orleans) and cultural (geeks, jocks, military, scholars, blue collar, white collar, etc.) selections.
Again, most of these represent in a combination of tonal variations, structure and idioms, but we'll start with tone and work our way out.
The best way to translate aural diction to written diction is purely to listen to it for a while. Find a sample somewhere (public places can be hit-and-miss, YouTube offers a decent sampling, larger media like movies and shows will often showcase common or even misused accents, so do your research) and shut your eyes. Write down what you're hearing, sound by sound.
"Ahvent bean to the races iss week, won't ahve a chahnce till next Fursday eve."
"Haven't been to the races this week, won't have a chance till next Thursday eve."
Legible, if a bit unwieldy. Cockney is like that. Notice the lack of apostrophe on "Ahvent." As I said, write the sounds, not the words. Don't try to translate what they're saying. Just write down exactly what you hear.
Once you have your raw transcript, the second step is the clean-up. 100% accuracy is likely to lead to low accessibility: we're not programmed as readers to translate sounds, we try to guess at the words as we go, so you may need to help your reader along (unless the point is for them to be befuddled).
The best ways to help your readers out are to let them know what they're missing, touch up the key points and lampshade the accent entirely. We'll get back to what that means in a moment.
"Letting them know what they're missing" typically involves the dreaded apostrophe. I say "dreaded" because apostrophe's are like commas on helium: easily overused. Don't go overboard.
If an accent involves dropping every G on an -ing ending, the natural tendency is to highlight it each time with an apostrophe:
"I figger we kin be gettin' on with arr day, closin' up shop 'n' movin' ma into town like we oughtta."
and much as I hate to admit it, you typically have to. We've come to expect it, culturally, and it helps us tell the difference between character accent and author typo. Just remember when you reach the end of the sentence that punctuation comes before the double-quotes:
"We best be goin'."
That will help visually rein in your word-endings even in an accented phrase.
The biggest troublemaker in the first snippet is the "and," here simply "'n'," given the accent. To and The are also big victims of this: t' and th' show up regularly. Each of these individually isn't so bad until you start mashing them all together, at which point it can get out of hand. That said, it can be done well:
"If th' landlady says we oughtta git movin', t' only thing I kin figger is we best be gettin' movin'."
but it can be done poorly:
"I need t' move t' couch to t' other side of t' room."
so be careful. Like the YouTube rule, read it aloud when you're done, exactly as its written. If you get tired of hearing it, don't be afraid to stretch some of the words back out to help stir up the mix:
"I need to move t' couch to th'other side of the room."
Dropping the end of To and The especially is best done with words that we naturally slur together. "Th'other" for instance becomes it's own contraction. Now you're putting your apostrophes to work (and they should be, the lazy buggers). By contrast, "the room" and "th' room" sound pretty much the same. Taking a break from the apostrophe race just means looking for the right spots to do so.
By contrast, when displaying Japanese to English, you typically have to add, not subtract.
One of the more familiar traits is that the Japanese don't tend to end names on a consonant, so trying to say many American names can lead to an added "uh" at the end (much like pronouncing a silent "e" on a name like "Mike"). Likewise, the Japanese alphabet doesn't have any combination consonants, so they have a tendency to insert vowels were we might not.
Take, for example, the name "Karl." To a native Japanese speaker, it might come out more like "Karalu," with a quick "a" and a very muted "u" on the end. The same is true for many words, but it tends to be most noticeable with names.
Touching up the key points is another good way to ensure accessibility to your audience. If every other word in a sentence is utter gibberish by the time you're finished, make sure that a few key words stand out unfiltered so that the audience can roughly put together what they're reading. Creole or any of the Caribbean island dialects are great examples of exactly how far you can go with a mash-up language:
"Ku ovah yonder, matey! Dat scurvy bobo be all up inne quashie's face. Dat hard-eared swab gonna get salt, mon... gonna get keelhauled and gonna be made into a duppy, mon."
-- [Courtesy of Blizzard, and its awesome public use policies]
To be frank, half the words in that sentence made no sense to me, but the gist remains: scurvy is easily identifiable even if "bobo" isn't. "Gonna get salt" has any manner of implications, but "keelhauled" isolates it as strong, negative punishment. You can understand a whole sentence without getting the idiomatic nouns so long as the structure is familiar and the in-between words still add up.
Oddly, adjectives and verbs are more important here than nouns. I have no clue what a bobo is exactly, but if it's scurvy, it can't be pleasant. That sets the tone for words like "hard-eared swab," referring to the same individual, and finally "duppy" (roughly meaning zombie or spirit) as a generic thing-that-is-bad.
Lastly, we can "lampshade" the accent to help ensure understanding. Lampshading (here, arguably misused) is a way of calling out the ridiculousness of a given character's mode of speech.
If a new character marches in spouting what you're confident your audience will consider incomprehensible gibberish, having one of the characters raise an eyebrow at the newcomer and say simply "...What?" can be a great way to maintain the full integrity of the accent (or even turn it up to 11) without having to worry about losing your audience.
Alternatively, if another character has learned over time to translate said newcomer's lingo, they may be able to act as interpreter. They don't have to simply restate everything the first character says: often it's best if they simply react to them in a way that implies what was said. [See, for example, Han and Chewie in Star Wars, or the way Rusty responds to The Amazing Yen in Ocean's Eleven.]
A last caution about tonal variance and representing it in speech: a number of accents that sound different to our ears look the same on paper. American Southern and British cockney look remarkably similar if all you're relying on is the visual sound of which letters get dropped and what words get slurred.
Which brings us to the remaining topics of structure and idioms.
For accents that either have so much tonal variance they become indecipherable or for dialects that sound roughly the same (at least as far as text is concerned), the best way to illustrate uniqueness is in how you say what you say.
For certain languages, the transition to English involves much worse than simple changes in letters and words. The shift in grammar and habits of other languages can trip up a non-native speaker in ways you might not expect. For instance, a Russian-born speaker may have a tendency to drop articles (a & the) throughout a sentence. This small change creates a surprisingly noticeable fork of traditional English.
Going from any Asian dialect (perhaps most notably Chinese) to English can lead to entire pieces of a sentence disappearing. So much of the language is different that speakers often struggle to express a familiar notion in an unfamiliar tongue.
There is no one-to-one relationship, so they're having to restate what they know, which leads to large gaps, or at times, a sentence comprised almost entirely of "bullet points," the focal concepts they want to get across, thrown together in a rough assembly without the intervening words and clauses we might expect.
"You, go to store, get fish for dinner. Martin's grocer, very good price!"
What we might instinctively consider as comical or even silly dialog makes a good deal more sense when you understand why, linguistically, such accents exist. Each language has its quirks when making the transition.
For dialects that are natively English and sound roughly alike, structure and idioms are often the only way to distinguish them. As an added benefit, they make comprehension almost a guarantee, with the possible exception of the idioms themselves.
British to American is famous for this particular usage. Idioms are often the only thing that separate us linguistically. Toilets become "loos," TVs become "teles," and that's just the simple noun-conversions. "Having a laugh," "Fanny's your aunt" and other such phrases pepper the lingo and help seal the speaker in their given cultural corner for your audience.
For British specifically, there is no shortage of idiomatic expressions. They can lend flavor and humor to your work, but like any other device, I advise against overusing them. Pepper them in only where they best fit. If you feel like you're tacking them on or cramming them in, chances are you're doing it wrong.
The American Mid-west has loads of its own tweaks to the common language, and it doesn't stop at "don'tcha know." There's a habit in Midwestern speech for the audible run-on sentence, where a speaker seamlessly segues from their original statement to two or three additional, tangential remarks, effectively commenting on their own commentary like some sort of lingual Mobius strip.
Of particular interest to me, given that I live in the Southeast, is the distinction between the various forms of Southern, and their too-often confused distant cousin: Texan.
South Carolina, Georgia and parts of Virginia boast a kind of "high brow" southern, the sort of linguistic elitism you'll find in old movies of plantation owners or so-called Southern Gentlemen. The distinction mostly shows up in the word choice: a smattering of remarkably scholarly words in an otherwise casual, informal diction. It leads to such combinations as "Why, I do declare" and "I reckon them boys is about to come to fisticuffs."
Also, point of note, it's spelled "y'all;" a contraction of You and All. "ya'll" would be the contraction of You and Will, so be careful where you put those apostrophes. Those damn things get everybody in trouble.
Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee tend to have a more gruff, twangy form of Southern, slurring much more frequently and generally speaking frankly without "puttin' on airs."
Texan is the heart of the twang. If you ever hear "H'yuck!" or "Aw, shucks," you're probably somewhere south of Dallas. Idiomatic expression dominate common diction almost as richly as British cockney here. While it's an awful example, the ridiculously charicatured speech of Yosemite Sam is, as far as structure goes, sadly close to the mark.
"Wound up tighter than a pig on a spit" is the sort of euphemism much of Texas is known for. But like with any other accent, it's easy to go overboard. Texas is, to put it mildly, a big state, so to say that everyone there speaks like a cartoon character is statistically ridiculous. However, if what you're looking for is a character with an accent that can easily and irrevokably identify them as Texan, you may have to dial it up a few notches...
That said, these are largely stereotypes and should be viewed as such, even when they're accurate. These are your templates, your general cookie-cutter phrasings. With any accent, any mode of speech, any tweak you wish to add to your characters' literary "face," the best method for unique discourse is always direct research.
Find someone whose voice or accent fits and just listen to them talk. Write what you hear, not what you think they're saying, but what you hear, and you will soon enough have a structure to work with that no one can ever say isn't genuine.
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