Native Accent

[AwkwardlySet]

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.

I second this. I cringe at the lingo in some stories. I suppose it brings authenticity to some stories, but to all of us who aren't native English speakers it is truly painful to read sometimes.

 

[WyreBendr0417]

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.

Thanks for the input. Like I said in my last post, I'm not going to rely much on phonetic spelling. I'm not ready to start writing this story yet anyway, just doing basic outlining and research so I don't have to when I do begin.

Thanks

WB

 

[WyreBendr0417]

Okay folks, I asked you answered and I want to thank you all. I thought I'd write a little piece of dialog that I'm thinking will be simplest for me and show the person speaking is not native to English. What little phonetic spelling I use, will be made quite obvious as what is below. Let me know what you think.

"It's nice to meet you Talia. Is that a Russian or Ukrainian accent I hear?"

"Depend on who ask."

"Why?"

"I am born Ukraine but edyucated in Russia. I am ceetizen of both. Sometimes wrong answer put you or someone you love in gulag. You understand what is gulag?"

"Yeah, I know what a gulag is."

"Gulag is bad. Vedy bad."

 

[Djmac1031]

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.

Agreed. Having her mispronounce English words, or use them incorrectly, is one thing... think the "testicles" instead of "tentacles" mistake from Better Off Dead. It can be both funny and endearing.

But a constant use of intentionally misspelled words to try and convey an accent can get real annoying, real fast.

Recently wrote a story featuring a woman from Mexico.

The closest I came to an accent was mentioning she had one.

That, and she occasionally slipped into her native Spanish. Just a few times, "Si'" instead of "yes," etc.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

"It's nice to meet you Talia. Is that a Russian or Ukrainian accent I hear?"

"Depend on who ask."

"Why?"

"I am born Ukraine but edyucated in Russia. I am ceetizen of both. Sometimes wrong answer put you or someone you love in gulag. You understand what is gulag?"

"Yeah, I know what a gulag is."

"Gulag is bad. Vedy bad."

The word choices are good. Apart from a couple commas needed, I'd stick to the standard spelling - or restrict the non-standard just to 'ceetizen'.
I don't know what your accent is, but in British, edyucated is how the word is normally pronounced.
This opinion worth what you paid for it, &c...

 

[Voboy]

It's personal preference, OP, but the moment I came across phonetically spelt dialect here I'd just back right out and find a new story.

It can be done well (Irvine Welsh) or poorly (Mark Twain), but it's usually painful to read.

I'd write the dialogue normally, but mention the effect the accent has on the listener.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Yestiddy, I was a dickering with ole man Johnson about him fixin' up my yard. Said he'd get round to it on Sad-day. (if you write dialects it can get real thick real fast)

 

[Bramblethorn]

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.

PLAY JAJA DING DONG

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.

Interesting reading. I think time and history are also important factors here.

Jim is a secondary character, ignorant and comical, subservient to Huck even after fleeing slavery. If I were to write a story where the only Black character is written like that, speaking an inauthentic dialect that I partly invented... I would not expect a good reaction from the audience, nor would I deserve it.

Twain was writing in the 19th century, a couple of decades after the Civil War. AFAIK a significant portion of his audience might have been people who still thought maybe slavery was okay, and part of his aim seems to have been to change their minds. His characterisation of Jim might be defended as a softly-softly approach, offering an adventure story from the perspective of a White boy who accepts slavery as God's will, with a non-threatening Black sidekick, and using that to win the readers' sympathies before introducing doubt and showing how Huck's natural instincts rebel against the system he's grown up with.

I'm not in that situation and I don't have Twain's excuses; I shouldn't expect to be able to transplant what he did in the 1880s and have it work for me.

 

[HordHolm]

PLAY JAJA DING DONG



Interesting reading. I think time and history are also important factors here.

Jim is a secondary character, ignorant and comical, subservient to Huck even after fleeing slavery. If I were to write a story where the only Black character is written like that, speaking an inauthentic dialect that I partly invented... I would not expect a good reaction from the audience, nor would I deserve it.

Twain was writing in the 19th century, a couple of decades after the Civil War. AFAIK a significant portion of his audience might have been people who still thought maybe slavery was okay, and part of his aim seems to have been to change their minds. His characterisation of Jim might be defended as a softly-softly approach, offering an adventure story from the perspective of a White boy who accepts slavery as God's will, with a non-threatening Black sidekick, and using that to win the readers' sympathies before introducing doubt and showing how Huck's natural instincts rebel against the system he's grown up with.

I'm not in that situation and I don't have Twain's excuses; I shouldn't expect to be able to transplant what he did in the 1880s and have it work for me.

I agree with the time/history (so, context) factor. There's a now largely forgotten WW1 novel called The Middle Parts of Fortune, written by Frederic Manning, which was hugely influential between the wars and up to the 1960s (in a compressed edition, the full text only being released later). The novel is set in the trenches during the lead up to the Battle of the Somme and transposes a cultural outsider, Private Bourne, into a battalion of soldiers from the Derbyshire coal fields. Bourne's language is that of an educated man (and he is constantly being asked to volunteer for officer training), whilst his fellow soldiers are all written in accent. It makes the book hard to read, but was done in part to make these working-class soldiers into victims by emphasising their lack of opportunities to get educated to the Bourne's level. Manning was very much writing with paternalistic sympathy, but it is still patronising. I think that trying the same thing now might get a very different response.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Mostly echoing what others have said...

Don't try to write out the dialogue phonetically. Hint at it. Let syntax do the heavy lifting. Sprinkle in commonly understood words from the character's native language. Comprenez vous?

 

[Duleigh]

Have any of you fine authors found a way to convey a character's native accent when writing dialog?

It is not easy, I've had some success with a southeast US accent and a British. Don't try to get every syllabol right, just the ones that stick out in your mind and get the nuances of the speech. In the southern accent they don't say I they say ah, and they don't say "all of you" they say y'all. Throw some of the main nuances in and let the readers mind fill in the rest.

 

[onehitwanda]

syllabol

 

[Duleigh]

That's what I get for writing a post while cursing a one-bomb in my mind. I need to stop looking at votes first thing in the morning

 

[onehitwanda]

That's what I get for writing a post while cursing a one-bomb in my mind. I need to stop looking at votes first thing in the morning

You're forgiven. This time. Don't make me break out the riding crop, though.

 

[Duleigh]

You're forgiven. This time. Don't make me break out the riding crop, though.

(25 votes for an 4.84, that's one one-bomb and 24 fives.)

 

[onehitwanda]

(25 votes for an 4.84, that's one one-bomb and 24 fives.)

where's the story, I'm going to give it 5 stars on principle.

 

[WyreBendr0417]

Mostly echoing what others have said...

Don't try to write out the dialogue phonetically. Hint at it. Let syntax do the heavy lifting. Sprinkle in commonly understood words from the character's native language. Comprenez vous?

To be clear, dropping the phonetic spelling, is this more what you have in mind?

"So, you are American tough guy, da?"

"Some people have said so, and I tend to agree with them."

"Hmm! in Russia, American tough guys wash dishes, take care of babies."

 

[onehitwanda]

To be clear, dropping the phonetic spelling, is this more what you have in mind?

"So, you are American tough guy, da?"

"Some people have said so, and I tend to agree with them."

"Hmm! in Russia, American tough guys wash dishes, take care of babies."

This reads much better for me. I know how Eastern Europeans and Russians speak; I can hear this clearly in my head. It works just fine for me.

 

[djrip]

To be clear, dropping the phonetic spelling, is this more what you have in mind?

"So, you are American tough guy, da?"

"Some people have said so, and I tend to agree with them."

"Hmm! in Russia, American tough guys wash dishes, take care of babies."

"In Soviet Russia, dishes wash you!"

 

[KentBloke]

A couple of other people have hit the nail on the head with trying to write how an accent sounds. The ceetizen example is a good one but you could also, probably already posted but I missed it, drop in words such as "da" instead of yes as most readers will get it.
I know from the Germans I knew years ago that their grammar is distinctly different from English such as "I ran to the train station very quickly at 3pm today" becomes "at 3pm I am running very quickly to ze train station!" They also have a problem with "th" as a sound as there is no equivalent in German or French, for that matter.
I have no clue if Romanain has such rigid grammatical rules but it could be worth exploring as a way to convey the character's speech patterns.

 

[stickygirl]

Okay folks, I asked you answered and I want to thank you all. I thought I'd write a little piece of dialog that I'm thinking will be simplest for me and show the person speaking is not native to English. What little phonetic spelling I use, will be made quite obvious as what is below. Let me know what you think.

"It's nice to meet you Talia. Is that a Russian or Ukrainian accent I hear?"

"Depend on who ask."

"Why?"

"I am born Ukraine but edyucated in Russia. I am ceetizen of both. Sometimes wrong answer put you or someone you love in gulag. You understand what is gulag?"

"Yeah, I know what a gulag is."

"Gulag is bad. Vedy bad."

Awful, to be brutally honest. Sounds like Chekov on Star Trek and I'd stop reading.
Most films that start in foreign language with subtitles quickly switch to spoken English. The idea of "this is foreign" is planted and then we can move on. Readers are not stupid and only need hints to remind them and laboured written accents get tiresome quickly.

My take on Polish/English, with which I'm familiar...
"Yes, we don't mind. We keep going and we can be out of your hairs much sooner," Kay said with an affected charm. //

"Then come back to my home - in Liverpool. I will make for you breakfast and you can stay." Kay looked up into the taller girl's eyes. //

"Yus! " Kay squealed excitedly. "Why you make this so hard for me? You make me twist your arms!"

I was surprised by the sound of the words from the first Romanian I met - more Italian that Slavic.
Cum te cheama is distinctly Mediterranean sounding vs Jak masz na imię in Polish.
There's also a difference in how men and women speak their European languages. Men are generally grumpy guttural orcs, women sound pissed off... only saying! That's how it sounds to me!

 

[alohadave]

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

If you leave out articles, it'll convey a non-English feeling.

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.

As a native English speaker, phonetic spelling sucks ass. A word or two for emphasis, or a slang word, sure. But reading the whole thing phonetically is not fun.

You can use grammar to a similar effect without pissing off your readers.

 

[Duleigh]

where's the story, I'm going to give it 5 stars on principle.

Enchantress It's a bit long but it's a fun read.

 

[MelissaBaby]

To be clear, dropping the phonetic spelling, is this more what you have in mind?

"So, you are American tough guy, da?"

"Some people have said so, and I tend to agree with them."

"Hmm! in Russia, American tough guys wash dishes, take care of babies."

That is very much what I had in mind.

 

[onehitwanda]

Enchantress It's a bit long but it's a fun read.

EEEEEEEEE IT'S DISCWORLD EEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!