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Writing Foreign Accents

by Drog
Posted to Craft, Dialogue on Wed Mar 15, 2006 at 06:47:12 AM PST
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I've been writing a novel for the past several months and some of my characters speak with accents. I've read that many writers and editors advise to NOT write the words phonetically as it can become irritating to the reader. Instead they advise you to write the words correctly, but using improper English grammar common to people from that geographic location.

I find that very difficult to do. I've never found any resource to give me hints regarding the common traits of English spoken by people with different first-languages, for instance (has anyone else?). I'm also not sure that writing phonetically is necessarily a bad thing. J.K. Rowling did it with her French character Fleur Delacour and I don't remember being annoyed. Maybe it just has to be done well, or subtly.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

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Should accents be written phonetically?
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    Writing Foreign Accents | 5 comments (5 topical, 0 hidden)
    foreign accents (4.00/1) (#3)
    by march4me on Wed May 17, 2006 at 11:12:31 PM PST
    Marina Lewycka does this well in "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian".
    The female protagonist speaks with a heavy Eastern European accent.
    "You good eat. I like man good eat"
    "I want for him in OxfordUniversity. You working OxfordUniversity, so you help?"
    I suspect this needs a good knowledge of the language in the first place. In addition, the authoress cleverly limits the episodes in which she uses accent, making the flow smooth for the reader.

    accents and dialect (3.00/0) (#1)
    by sabeth on Sat Feb 25, 2006 at 09:25:03 PM PST
    Interesting question. I do agree that it can get distracting if a character is always "speaking" in misspelled English in a book. It's less disruptive to describe someone as having a accent or give them a few quirks that remind the reader they have a particular speaking style, that is, give them a phrase or two they use habitually that has a bit of foreign flavor, but one that the reader will start to recognize and won't have to work to understand each time. The last thing you want is for a reader to go, "Oh no, not a scene with him again ... I never understand what he's saying." With Fleur Delacour, it's not so bad because she's a relatively minor character, and but her accent as it is written is also a bit of a caricature of a French accent.

    I found a couple sites with common ESL (English as a Second Language) errors, although which of these mistakes a particular person will be prone to make depends a lot on their native language. Here's a page of common errors by Spanish speakers, for instance. A good way to figure out what's appropriate for a speaker of a particular language is to get an introductory book to that language, and see how it differs from English, then imagine if you were used to that way of speaking, how you'd try to translate your thoughts into English. As those sites indicate, it's often the simplest things that are hardest to get used to in another language.

    On a related topic, there are all sorts of cool studies on different dialects among native English speakers. Here's one on reginal variations in the US including differences in vocabulary and grammar.

    --ich sage nicht, was ich will, sondern was die Sprache will--

    Fleur and phonetics (3.00/0) (#2)
    by janra on Wed Mar 15, 2006 at 07:04:44 AM PST
    As I recall, Fleur's speech had only a few characteristic misspellings which people tend to identify as a french accent (dropped 'h', changed 'th', etc) instead of being actually phonetic. There were some misspellings, but they didn't get in the way of understanding what she was saying.

    When the misspellings turn the sentence into a cipher, you know you've gone too far with the accent... :-)

    My books are still in boxes from moving, but I'll try to dig out one I have on dialogue to post its example of a phonetically written southern accent, and a "grammar and just the flavour" of the same sentence. The phonetically written one is incomprehensible unless you already know what she's talking about.

    One problem with I haven't seen writing books address is, one of the problems with writing phonetically (and without using IPA) is: what if you and your reader have significantly different accents? They'll read something written "phonetically" in a different way than you intended it. What does that 'a' sound like?

    It's like an American writing a Canadian accent, and using "aboot". To a Canadian reading it, it just sounds silly - we don't say aboot - 'oo' and 'ou' are entirely different sounds to us as well, even though to an American ear it sounds like we're saying something closer to 'aboot' than how they pronounce 'about'.
    --
    Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?

    language juggling (3.00/0) (#5)
    by CTVSue on Mon Jul 03, 2006 at 09:57:39 PM PST
    I agree with sabeth. If you choose to write in broken English, do the research. Word order is dictated by the language. I also agree that mispelling words to project a dialect is distracting. If you want the reader to understand a character speaks with a southern drawl, use the right words. Ex.: "They ain't no way he's comin' back. That old boy's headed for town."

    Aviator (3.00/0) (#6)
    by Aviator on Tue Oct 16, 2007 at 05:54:38 PM PST
    Writing Foreign Accents | 5 comments (5 topical, 0 hidden)
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