Conveying Accents
By Evan Braun

Everyone, everywhere, speaks with an accent. It doesn’t matter what your first language is or where you grew up. When someone from a different place than you hears you speak, they’ll pick up the telltale signals.

“Oh, this guy’s from the Midwest.”

“She’s a Newfoundlander!”

And of course there’s a lot of regional variation. I once watched a YouTube video of someone who could recognize, and accurately reproduce, somewhere in the neighbourhood of a hundred distinct speaking styles from England alone. To the discerning ear, the way a person rolls their R’s may clarify exactly which small town they’re from.

How can all these delightful variations be conveyed in text?

The short answer: it’s tricky.

Since accents are all about the unique way words sound, a writer’s first instinct is often to spell out words phonetically.

“Ya shore ya’d wan ‘er t’go ta scool dis marnin’?”

For a character who speaks once or twice, maybe you can get away with this. Emphasis on maybe.

But let’s be real—this is obnoxious to read, not to mention laborious. It’ll kill the reader’s momentum dead. By accentuating the very particular way words are meant to sound, you’re making the text so hard to understand that the reading is no longer fun.

If your dedication to phonetic accuracy comes at the expense of readability, you need to reconsider your approach.

I have seen books where a main character’s dialogue is written this way and it’s brutal.

Let me give you a real-world example. When Star Wars: A Phantom Menace came out in 1999 to great fanfare, many of us were left scratching our heads at the character of Jar Jar Binks, a character who spoke… in a very odd way, to put it mildly.

I’m not here to render an opinion on that character or his accent or mannerisms (if I were, I might point out that many people find this character offensive in addition to cartoonish). But as to how he speaks… fortunately, this being a movie, we can listen to his dialogue without having to spend much time thinking about how it might be phonetically transcribed.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for readers of the novelization, a book which gave us a litany of passages like this one:

“We safe now,” Jar Jar observed with a grateful sigh, leaning back in his seat. “Tis okeday, hey?”

 

“Heydey ho, yous,” he tried, hands gesturing. “Tis a long trip somewheres, hey?”

 

Jar Jar came forward a few steps, studying the condition of the droid. “Me find oil can back dere. Yous need it?”

A whole book of this stuff can get really, truly, awfully tedious. It’s not worth the trouble, either for the writer or the reader. So I implore you not to take this approach. Absolute phonetic fidelity is not a virtue. It introduces a distraction that will take the reader out of the story.

Besides, every one of us hears accents in different ways. The way in which one author may transcribe the sounds may not match another person’s interpretation of the same accent.

Also, and perhaps this point overrides the others: the attempt to reproduce an accent may end up being—unintentionally, I would hope—discriminatory and offensive.

Come to think of it, this boils down to a very similar point to the one I made a couple of months ago about writing like a director instead of a writer. The problem there, as here, is the author trying to exert too much control over the reader’s experience.

A better way to convey how a character sounds is to include the occasional, subtle reminder that they speak with a certain accent. This way you won’t offend anyone, nor will you distract them, or irritate them to the point of closing the book in exhaustion.

“Yeah, but how will they know how a particular word sounds?” someone asks.

The answer is that maybe they won’t—and maybe they don’t need to.

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Did you enjoy this post? You may be interested in As the Author, Are You Writing or Directing? For more great writing tips check out Evan's other posts, here.

About this Contributor:

Evan Braun is a full-time author and editor. He has authored three novels, the first of which, The Book of Creation, was shortlisted in two categories at the 2012 Word Awards. He has released two sequels, The City of Darkness (2013) and The Law of Radiance (2015), completing the series. Braun is an experienced professional editor, and has worked with Word Alive Press authors since 2006. He is also a regular contributor at The Fictorians, a popular writing blog.