Q: what have you encountered writing accents?

[mariusthered]

In Talesfromswipecity I have lots of people from different places, not all of them show up in the first season ( currently running and looking for followers ) I have cops with New York style accents and mobsters ,even a bloke from London.

Writing a comic based in America when your from England has it's challenges and one of them is writing accents and learning how people speak from different states and counties.( the same thing can be called lots of things )

the hardest I came across was I was trying to write a character who was an Irish Priest, but i gave it up as a bad job in the end because i just could not get conversations to flow right.

Q: what have you encountered writing accents?

[keii4ii]

Here's my rather unique predicament with Heart of Keol:

• The main character's primary language is English, but he can speak broken Korean, just well enough to get by.

• Most of the cast only speaks Korean.

• Half the cast (so far) speaks a specific regional dialect of Korean, and this is relevant to the story.

None of those were problems when I was publishing the comic in Korean. But now that I'm focusing on an English-speaking audience, how do I do this? There's no way to do it without shooting myself in the foot at least once, with a .50 caliber gun.

I can't borrow existing English accents. I don't want to ignore the accent altogether. So I made up my own accent with internally consistent rules (having a degree in linguistics helps), which would have worked very well if the dialogues were voiced... but alas, that's not the case. Most new readers go through "why are these characters speaking weird?" phase before they get used to it -- if they stick around long enough. :T

But retroactively removing the accent would be akin to shooting myself in the foot AGAIN. So I won't. What I am going to do is to insert a very brief scene that lampshades the accent in one of the early chapters, so it'll at least look intentional.

[VermillionWorks]

I haven't written many non-American accents (I'm American myself), save for maybe English which I did....OKAY with...I assume. I've also had to keep in mind of '30s slang with Daniel, which I probably should've considered more often, actually. ^_^; Wayne and his crew, being Chicago gangsters, spoke with a bit more slang than the main characters.

....but if I did try writing a character with another European or Asian accent or something, I'd try to keep it fairly subtle in the dialogue, even if the character has a thick accent. I've read comics where the accents are written in a VERY distracting manner that's both a pain to read and 'hear' in your mind. It can even take away from the drama of a scene if you're not careful.

[mariusthered]

I guess it's a case like i do of having to speak the lines aloud to try and work out how to write them. This can be a problem when changing to an audience of a different country.

in another thing I wrote I had a character who was french but refused to speak English. now apart from saying hello and my name is Aron that's about as far as my French goes . to overcome the problem I had the woman accompanied with an English speaking interpreter at all times, this way i could get away with writing her dialogue in English. maybe an interpreter character would work for you somewhere in your story. ?

I will give it a follow and comment

[mariusthered]

It can even take away from the drama of a scene if you're not careful.

Very true.

I love writing gangsters my main guy is called Stanley Francisco (yer I know!) his accent comes a lot from watching loads of movies and CSI NY

[Kura]

This is actually a topic that I have discussed significantly with fans and other writers. In general I find my audience doesn't mind accents if depicting them includes removing or adding words used. While the biggest things that people seem to agree most upon is most people DO NOT like it when writers butcher the words for the sake of making it look like they are speaking in an accent.

"Why you do like this?" seems to be fine. (just pisses of grammar nazi's who don't catch on that it's an accent)

"Harrow dare, dis ish vary gewd day today" is greatly frowned upon and seen as offensive.

While accents that have a habit of changing words into other words or combining words to make one word like 'What ya’ll gonna be up ta ta’marra?' seem to have a 50/50 chance of being liked or hated.

Dialect is a little easier to incorporate, accents from English as a second language can easily become offensive no mater how careful you try and be with it. It's all dependent on how sensitive your readers are to (usually their language) being depicted by English speaking creators.

[joannekwan]

I'm currently writing a character from Manchester (I'm west coast American) and I've been using a lot of "yer", "ain't", "me", and "innit"s. And as I usually do with most accent's, some apostrophes for shortened words. I've also looked into some local slang. Youtube helps a lot.

But a lot of the time I let the pace of speech and word choice do most of the "talking" for the more slight accents my characters have. At least it works in my head, not sure how other's would interpret them. xD

[mariusthered]

grammar nazi's

ha! I clash with these all the time, not on purpose but because I have genuine trouble with grammar, it always takes me longer to write stories because i have to check and recheck stuff ( dyslectic ) . my character Simon Sykes does just as you said and brakes things up.

sample ...

[Kamikaze]

Pretty much everything has been said here. The one thing I didn't see mentioned is that often if someone is speaking say English (as a non-native/learning speaker), they're less likely to use 'combined words'. These mean things like:
She'll
Y'all
Hasn't
Don't
I'll
Couldn't, etc.

Instead folks will say the full proper forms:
She will
You all
Has not
Do not
I will
Could not

After talking to a few folks learning English as a second language apparently that bit is something that definitely trips folks up, so they find it easier just to say it all verses feeling like an idiot if they get it wrong.

[keii4ii]

The one thing I didn't see mentioned is that often if someone is speaking say English (as a non-native/learning speaker), they're less likely to use 'combined words'.

This depends on the circumstances of their learning. If they're taking classes, they will typically use less contractions. But if they're picking up the language informally (e.g. second generation immigrants learning their parents' first language), they will use contractions just as often as the people they're picking it up from. Some of them seem to use it exclusively, even!

[keii4ii]

maybe an interpreter character would work for you somewhere in your story. ?

Unfortunately, that's not going to work with my story. I just need to stick with what I've been doing. All of the dialogues are presented in English, like an English dub of a foreign language film.

(Edit: But don't let that discourage you from giving me suggestions!)

[Kamikaze]

Oh good point @keii4ii!

[shazzbaa]

I agree with the others; despite the fact that I, um, uh, have used phonetic accents in a few places in my own comic -- unless it's a really subtle change that doesn't alter the feel of a word, it can get distracting for a reader when you feel like you have to constantly read creatively-spelled dialect aloud to understand what it's meant to sound like.
I really like this example from The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics:

"Zut alors! Ze Frenchman, 'e speaks like zis? Well, he can, but again, moderation is advised. My French national was drawing perilously close to stereotyping, and, that aside, such torturous locutions can get pretty tiresome pretty quickly. But the sentence, he could be awkwardly phrased, with perhaps the wrong pronoun. This strangeness could be suggesting a speaker not familiar with the English.

A weird alternate option I'm fond of is playing with lettering, (though this is another one that can easily get OUT OF HAND). My main character is deaf, and I imagine her speaking with a noticeable deaf accent; I wanted to get that across without distractingly misspelling all her words, so she has her own font.

It's basically an all-lowercase, more childlike penmanship because of the effect her accent has -- people in the comic who don't know she's deaf sometimes assume she's "slow" or has a speech impediment. When she's using sign language, her font goes back to normal because she communicates more comfortably in that language -- while the opposite will be true with some other characters who use sign language later on.

Asterix used to do this sort of thing all the time as a joke (I recall The Goths literally spoke in Gothic fonts). And of course Homestuck was/is infamous for its characters' "typing quirks," but back when I was a big Homestuck fan I suddenly noticed that I sure did start reading the number 2 as a lisped S wayyy more organically than I would've read a spelled-out lisp. That realisation has definitely affected the way I look at conveying idiosyncrasies in speech.
It's a weird direction play with, and you can absolutely end up with an incomprehensible mess where everyone speaks in a different clashing font, but there's also some really interesting things you can do by messing with the medium -- and it's a direction I think still has a lot of potential!

[AnnaLandin]

I've set my comic in a fantasy universe, so I don't have any real-world regional accents in it - differentiating between characters, I focus more on individual mannerisms and levels of formality. I've got one character who speaks very brusquely, another who stays very formal, one who flares up and gets angry very easily, etc.,.

In general, I've found that less is more, when reading comics that do. If you write the accent out all phonetically, trying to mark out every quirky vowel and dragged out consonant, it becomes a pain to read. Put just enough phonetic spelling in for the reader to realise there IS an accent - picking certain dialect-words instead of standard ones is good too, as is using any regional grammar-rules (some turns of phrase are more common in certain dialects, etc.).

Just try to keep things as readable as possible. A few dropped g's and h's work fine, but when you start changing the spelling of every single word, it becomes quite difficult to understand what they are even saying, especially for those of us who speak English as a second language.

I think focusing more on word-choices than on phonetic spelling might be good. Consider which words are used in which region - the debate on whether to use "soda" or "cola" or "pop" to describe carbonated drinks, for example, or which variant of "you" people use (you/y'all/yourself, etc.) - and concentrate on word-order and grammar choices. Some phonetics are fine, as I said, but just don't go overboard.

Pretty much everything has been said here. The one thing I didn't see mentioned is that often if someone is speaking say English (as a non-native/learning speaker), they're less likely to use 'combined words'. These mean things like:

This may be true for some people, but not for everyone. I speak English as a second language, and I speak it so fluently that I'm MORE likely to use contractions and combined words.

I learned it in a classroom, and am not a second generation immigrant. I'm a Swede, living in Sweden, surrounded by other Swedes. I might occasionally trip up on a word-choice or some grammar-rule, but it doesn't happen often. My fluency is a matter of practise and exposure to English-language media.

How a character speaks will mostly depend on who they are, rather than what they are, IMHO.

[mariusthered]

How a character speaks will mostly depend on who they are, rather than what they are, IMHO.

also very true. the way a character speaks can indeed make a character.

take Darth Vader with his nice clear British accent, it makes him menacing ( right to the point they take his helmet off in return of the jedi , then he's just some weedy old bloke dying and his speech pattern is complacently different.

[Elwetritsche]

I also use characters from different places. Briefly, I thought about adding accents but that is something I personally would not enjoy to read because it is harder to stay focused ob what they are actually saying. Or it would maybe even sound offensive against the race of a character. So instead, I focused on how the characters will form sentences (short, long, with pauses ...) or if they are prone to use simple, complex or ornate words to express themselves. Just have them be unique by the words they use. Maybe I'll even get across the tone of voice they are speaking with. I'm no expert in this; just fumbling around.

[mariusthered]

Or it would maybe even sound offensive against the race of a character.

yes it's a thin line , this is why I don't have many black characters from gangs and such because its a culture that is alien to me and i'm sure i would get things wrong and offend people. so i just have a guy named Sweets ( because he keeps says "sweet" )

[jessiepolfliet]

I am not good with words, and not only was I stupid enough to decide to write my comic in English(which isn't my native language) 2 of the main four characters have difficult accents. One who speaks English but is native in Portugese, I have never learnt a single Portugese word. And the other who has a Australian slang as accent. I have often trouble to convey that these two characters aren't from American origin due to their speech.

[mariusthered]

one movie that springs to mind that you might be able to use for reference is chappie ( I'm not saying it's a good movie) it's set in south Africa and the accents are pretty strong, a lot of people get the accent of south Africa and Australian mix up so in written form this might help. ( and before all the people from oz start heading my way with pitch folks i'm only stating an observation.)

[SpavVy]

Accents aren't my strongest point but I'm working on that. One of my main characters was born and raised in Brooklyn New York so she does have a slight accent, I also have characters from Germany, Italy and so on.