Native Accent

[WyreBendr0417]

Have any of you fine authors found a way to convey a character's native accent when writing dialog? I am outlining a new story in which the MFC is of European descent and I'd like for readers to 'hear' her accent as they read her her dialog. I know this is asking a lot, but her accent is a big part her charm that attracts the MMC.

I know I could try to spell the words as they might sound in her Americanized native accent, but that's probably another whole can of worms in itself. Especially since most of my stories are dialog heavy.

I thought of adding a note at the beginning to encourage readers to try and imagine the accent, but that's liable to blow up in my face, putting readers off. If anyone has any ideas I'd be more than happy to entertain them.
Thank You!

WB

 

[SeraphNocturne]

I think the best way to do this is to listen to speech in audio, movies or other media that portray the way your desire this character to speak, and do your best to imbue your character's dialogue with that essence. I think when it comes to penning accents or drawls, some misspelled words are acceptable to get your point across... and the only time I really recall this backfiring as a reader was trying to read through a Dwarf or Orc's heavy accent.

I find including slang or other commonly used phrases from the character's place of origin is also helpful when trying to establish a character with an accent.

 

[NotWise]

Hard for me to grasp what a "European" accent sounds like. Do you have anything specific in mind? A Spanish accent and a Czech accent aren't going to sound alike.

Aside from that, you could do something like "All her j's sounded like y's. I thought that was cute."

 

[WyreBendr0417]

I think the best way to do this is to listen to speech in audio, movies or other media that portray the way your desire this character to speak, and do your best to imbue your character's dialogue with that essence. I think when it comes to penning accents or drawls, some misspelled words are acceptable to get your point across... and the only time I really recall this backfiring as a reader was trying to read through a Dwarf or Orc's heavy accent.

I find including slang or other commonly used phrases from the character's place of origin is also helpful when trying to establish a character with an accent.

That is the plan I had in mind, but thought I'd inquire about a better way. My inspiration for the character and story is from a movie I recently watched, and already have a pretty good idea of how she should sound, but I was concerned if what I put in print would come across as I intended. I realize stories are subject to the individual reader's interpretation as well.

Thank You!

WB

 

[SeraphNocturne]

You're quite welcome, best of luck with it!

 

[SimonDoom]

I think the better way to do this is to focus on word usage rather than on pronunciation. Like if she throws in a couple of words from the home country, or if she uses English in a way a native speaker would not.

It's really easy to go wrong if you re-write your prose to make it try to "sound" a certain way. It can come across as comical. If you insist on doing it, then my advice is don't do a lot of it. A little goes a long way.

 

[WyreBendr0417]

Hard for me to grasp what a "European" accent sounds like. Do you have anything specific in mind? A Spanish accent and a Czech accent aren't going to sound alike.

Aside from that, you could do something like "All her j's sounded like y's. I thought that was cute."

I said European as a generality. The accent I want to portray is Romanian. Readers could probably fudge it with Russian if they are more familiar with that.

Thank You!

WB

 

[WyreBendr0417]

I think the better way to do this is to focus on word usage rather than on pronunciation. Like if she throws in a couple of words from the home country, or if she uses English in a way a native speaker would not.

It's really easy to go wrong if you re-write your prose to make it try to "sound" a certain way. It can come across as comical. If you insist on doing it, then my advice is don't do a lot of it. A little goes a long way.

That was my concern with my stories being dialog laden. I didn't want to get mired down in a lot of misspelling. I plan more research on Romanian as I know many nationalities leave out words in broken English that Americans use naturally.

Thanks!

WB

 

[ElectricBlue]

I did it this way, very low key, giving the character a slightly unusual speech pattern:

"And now it is cold, and you give me your jacket to be warm."

As she spoke, I realised something about Delilah, the way she talked. She had a slight accent, a very precise way with her words, a non English lilt to her speech. She wasn't a native English speaker, Slavic maybe, or east European. My mind suddenly flashed back several decades, remembering a Russian girl on a train, a blonde woman from Leningrad going west to model, to be in magazines.

"You are a proper gentleman, Adam. And I will look neat in your jacket."

"Better on you than on me, that's for sure." I slipped the jacket from my back, and held it open for Delilah to put on. She put one arm into a sleeve, turned a little, then slid her other arm into the other sleeve. The jacket was too big for her, so she doubled it across her torso, hiding those lovely breasts. I'd looked away, but of course I'd seen her curves.

"I can feel your warmth on my back. I won't be so cold in a minute." She looked around, and the queue was longer now. "But Adam, you will be cold. That cannot do. We will share your jacket for a little while."

 

[ronde]

Have any of you fine authors found a way to convey a character's native accent when writing dialog? I am outlining a new story in which the MFC is of European descent and I'd like for readers to 'hear' her accent as they read her her dialog. I know this is asking a lot, but her accent is a big part her charm that attracts the MMC.

I know I could try to spell the words as they might sound in her Americanized native accent, but that's probably another whole can of worms in itself. Especially since most of my stories are dialog heavy.

I thought of adding a note at the beginning to encourage readers to try and imagine the accent, but that's liable to blow up in my face, putting readers off. If anyone has any ideas I'd be more than happy to entertain them.
Thank You!

WB

Spelling phonetically works for me, but should be done to the minimuml extent possible to convey the characters accent. Too much becomes a chore to read. I'd also avoid using many words that require an apostrophe to denote a missing letter or else the dialogue quickly becomes unreadable. Usually it's enough to just throw in a word here and there that might sound different if spoken with an accent, or use words that are common to that area. For instance, what most people know as a shopping cart is a shopping "buggy" here in the South. We also "carry" people places rather than "take" them, as in, "I carried my wife to the doctor yesterday."

 

[NotWise]

Ooh! You could make her sound like Count Dracula!

Romanian is a Romance language. I don't think it has much in common with Russian.

 

[Trionyx]

Romanian is a Romance language. I don't think it has much in common with Russian.

Exactly.
BTW, it is fairly easy to put in little pronunciation clues for certain languages.
“You vill go to ze store, ja?” It is fairly easy to peg this as German.
Because Romanian is a relatively less well known language, such built in clues will be far less likely to be interpreted correctly. If Romanian isn’t essential, you may want to consider another language.

 

[WyreBendr0417]

Exactly.
BTW, it is fairly easy to put in little pronunciation clues for certain languages.
“You vill go to ze store, ja?” It is fairly easy to peg this as German.
Because Romanian is a relatively less well known language, such built in clues will be far less likely to be interpreted correctly. If Romanian isn’t essential, you may want to consider another language.

Romanian is not an absolute, just a first choice inspired by a Romanian actress playing a Russian role. Russian is my alternate for the time being.

Thanks!

WB

 

[HordHolm]

I'm European and I live in Central Europe - relatively a stone's throw from Romania, and I couldn't tell you for the life of me what a Romanian accent sounds like. Also, and it's a subjective thing, but I get rapidly turned off by an author attempting to 'write' accent - I have to spend too much time figuring out the words rather than focussing on the meaning/mood.

Personally, I'd go with SimonDoom on this one; when she first speaks add a descriptor of how her accent sounds to the listener, then add an occasional Romanian word to remind the reader. Also, if she's speaking English, allow her to make an occasional (small) mistake - nothing comical or ridiculous, but perhaps giving an American item the noun we would be more likely to use in Europe, or have her refer to Romanian food. Another common thing amongst non-English speakers is to use 'do' when English speakers would use 'make' - I teach and I have to correct this all the damn time.

 

[Rustyoznail]

This ^^^

I've edited a lot of stories by non English speakers, and it's very easy to pick it's not their native language.

On the other hand, I write mostly in Aussie English and it confuses the hell out of people.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Menoetes did a great job on a Russian accent in his Widows Gift series.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Eye dialect gets irritating to read pretty quickly, and it also risks coming off as patronising when writers impose it on other people's dialects while ignoring the weirdnesses of their own. If you're goin' ta wri' Oirish folk wi' tha full "somebody stole my consonants" treatment, but your American characters still cook with "herbs" not "erbs", non-US readers might start muttering about motes and beams. If you're using it, use it sparingly.

Rather than spelling out accents (for which, read: only some people's accents), my preference for flagging this kind of thing is to find a few grammatical quirks appropriate to the speaker.

Picking on Trionyx' example, for instance, I'd be more likely to write this as something like:

"You go to the store, yes?"

German often uses present tense in situations where English would use the future tense. For instance, in the German dub of "The Terminator", Arnie says "Ich komme wieder" (present tense, literally "I am coming again") rather than the more literal future-tense translation "ich werde zurück sein". IME, that kind of idiom is often distinctive enough to mark the speaker out as non-fluent, and to get the reader hearing their accent, without needing to spell out the sounds - though it can take a bit of homework to figure out what would be appropriate quirks, and maybe a native speaker to check it.

(Another reason for a non-confident German to avoid "will" here is that it's one of the most annoying false-friend words between those two languages - in German it means "want to" not "going to", and it's really easy to trip up on that.)

For "Loss Function" one of my characters is a native Russian speaker. I don't think I used any phonetic spellings, but I gave her dialogue like this:

We visited the mansion that had once belonged to a local count, famous for having (probably) slept with Catherine the Great when she visited Sergeigrad in 1773. "Everybody here thinks he's hero for that," she told me. "Big deal. She fucked him once, never came back. Sounds like disappointment for her."

Maybe it's just me, but I find it very hard to read that without hearing the matching accent in my head.

 

[oneagainst]

This ^^^

I've edited a lot of stories by non English speakers, and it's very easy to pick it's not their native language.

On the other hand, I write mostly in Aussie English and it confuses the hell out of people.

Assuming the base language of the story is English: yeah, reckon you go with the speech patterns and throw in some dialect for most english-speaking characters, but also there are wor contractions and word choices that let you pin a character down: whether someone's chugging a tinnie or acting like a jackass pins them down to a country. For a "european" accent, you need to decide if they're speaking english or not, then it's down to the sentence construction to denote a non-native speaker, lack of contractions, maybe fling in some swearwords. If they're going to be putting paragraphs of Dutch onto the page, you'd have to work out a trick to translate, e.g. having an interpreter character there.

 

[onehitwanda]

I got a very snotty email from someone once for daring to make one of my characters go "Ja, ja" - a very typical phrase from where I'm from. Apparently real people don't speak that way, and the 30 or so million of us who do are just figments of my admittedly fertile imagination.

Anyway... I'm with @Bramblethorn , @HordHolm and @SimonDoom on this one. You can't write dialect; it never comes out well. Far better to pepper your work with "native" words where the character doesn't know the english equivalent, or use the grammar structures of the native speaker if you're familiar with them. It's less jarring and less likely to bemuse readers of your chosen foreign nationality.

 

[SimonDoom]

Here's an interesting article on the use of dialects by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn: https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Different-Dialects-within-Huckleberry-Finn.

Huckleberry Finn is the best example I can recall of the successful use of dialect in a novel. It's a very distinctive feature of the story, and different characters have different dialects. Twain was very meticulous about the dialects he used, but as the article points out he may not have been as strictly accurate with them as he thought.

One of the things I think makes it work is that it's a humorous story, and the way people talk to one another enhances the comic effect of the story. That's not necessarily an effect you'd want to convey in an erotic story.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Picking on Trionyx' example, for instance, I'd be more likely to write this as something like:

"You go to the store, yes?"

Agree this. It only needs a light touch, keeping it subtle, and don't flog it to death. If a reader doesn't pick up on nuance, that's their issue, not the author's.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

As little as possible to get the message across. The Romanians I know tend to over-use the simple present tense and use other tenses in slightly odd ways. And overuse yes and no a lot.

Eg someone fluent enough to do everything in English, lived here 12 years: "Yes, yes, I tell him yesterday, I will go to the store today. I will be buying all the things, he should not worry! Yes, even the... what you say? Not cream, when you make butter, what is left...?"
Buttermilk?

Etc. You'd want less of that if the person is closer to native levels of English.

 

[joy_of_cooking]

Echoing what many other are saying to warn you away from eye dialect. The way I like to see a foreign accent are in the grammar and word choice not the pronunciation.

I don't know much about Romanian, but the most easily translated feature of Russian is the absence of articles. Russian doesn't have anything like "a", "an", or "the" and non-fluent speakers will often omit them in English. Imagine, "I went to store yesterday and cashier said to me..."

Non-native speakers coming to English from any language will also tend toward simpler sentences with fewer grammatical tenses. E.g., they may say, "I go to the store yesterday" because who can remember that the past tense of "go" is "went"?

They may also use words in a way that gets the denotation right but not the register or the connotation. E.g., they don't know the word "football" (or they think that means round) so they say a watermelon has "ovoid morphology". Or they may tell someone his shoes look "old-fashioned" instead of "retro" or "vintage".

If you do want to try the pronunciation, a way to do your research is to look up written guides for Russian speakers trying to eliminate their accent. These are nice because they show you how to describe the mispronunciations in writing. E.g., https://accentsoff.com/inside-the-russian-accent/

But I would use this knowledge to make other characters notice the sound, e.g.,

He didn't know what language Sasha usually spoke, but it didn't seem to have a's or th's. He made "math class" sound like "met cless".

 

[WyreBendr0417]

Echoing what many other are saying to warn you away from eye dialect. The way I like to see a foreign accent are in the grammar and word choice not the pronunciation.

I don't know much about Romanian, but the most easily translated feature of Russian is the absence of articles. Russian doesn't have anything like "a", "an", or "the" and non-fluent speakers will often omit them in English. Imagine, "I went to store yesterday and cashier said to me..."

Non-native speakers coming to English from any language will also tend toward simpler sentences with fewer grammatical tenses. E.g., they may say, "I go to the store yesterday" because who can remember that the past tense of "go" is "went"?

They may also use words in a way that gets the denotation right but not the register or the connotation. E.g., they don't know the word "football" (or they think that means round) so they say a watermelon has "ovoid morphology". Or they may tell someone his shoes look "old-fashioned" instead of "retro" or "vintage".

If you do want to try the pronunciation, a way to do your research is to look up written guides for Russian speakers trying to eliminate their accent. These are nice because they show you how to describe the mispronunciations in writing. E.g., https://accentsoff.com/inside-the-russian-accent/

But I would use this knowledge to make other characters notice the sound, e.g.,

He didn't know what language Sasha usually spoke, but it didn't seem to have a's or th's. He made "math class" sound like "met cless".

After reading all the great advice here in AH and spending a good part of the night doing research, I decided to go with my alternate accent, Russian. As well, I don't think I'll rely too much on phonetic spelling, but more, as many have suggested, leaving out articles and a few verbs native speakers do not use, like 'to be'.

For anyone that is interested, I found out about a book titled, 'Learner English,' written by Micheal Swan. It's meant for English teachers of multilingual students, and points out the common mistakes made by those learning English as a second language. It covers a wide range of languages.

Another idea I found was to occasionally use native words that are close to their English counterpart, eg. school, is shkola in Russian. If someone here on AH suggested that and I missed it, I apologize.

Thank You!

WB

 

[Omenainen]

I want to add that as a non native reader, phonetic spelling of dialects is really painful to read. I need to at first try to understand what the spelling might sound like when read by an English speaker, and then reduce it back to how it might be spelled right, and it’s very tedious. Also people who were born deaf will probably be completely unable to figure it out, plus I don’t know how well different text to speech programs are able to cope. So if you choose to use phonetic spelling, you’re making your work less accessible.