How to Handle Accents

[Black Dragon]

How do you handle characters with accents?

Personally, I've never cared much for the technique of misspelling words in dialogue so as to convey an accent. Mark Twain did this in his novels, and I always found it to be grating and often unreadable.

What are some other approaches?

[BeigePalladin]

I do it for particularly strong accents, but I still try to keep things redeable. so the accent may come across as a litle off because I'm not placing three/four undreedable words one after another.

though I can see why some people get annoyed by them.

[Chilari]

My characters aren't speaking English; I've established that there are two (main) languages, one being the first language of the wealthy, the other the first language of the poor. Most of my characters speak both, a few never had the opportunity or need to learn the other. I use the distinction of whether the character has an accent or not to establish which language is their first language and how good they are at the other, and as a side effect, their social status and exposure to those of different social statuses. In the excerpt I posted in the Showcase forum, for example, Jeck is aware that his Eroghoan, the language of the rich, is too heavily accented for him to pass as one of them.

So while I don't alter words to make an accent obvious, I will occasionally outright say that someone speaks with an accent, or has halting Eroghoan, etc to demonstrate their fluency in one or another language.

[Kelise]

I've heard a few authors say that is all your characters speak with the same tongue, then you're making it odd to make a point of writing it like that - because they wouldn't hear each other as such.
I suppose if you had one or two characters out of your cast who had an accent, then that would be the time (if any) to do it. Personally, I'd rather not read it like that. Like Chilari said, saying outright that someone has halting speech etc is a good way to do it. Or if you say one character had difficulty understanding another because of it, etc.

As for writing with an accent, it's very hard to do right. Probably best to not try unless you manage to do it awesomely.

[Ophiucha]

I hate reading phonetic accents. Nothing pulls me out of a story quicker than having to decipher every missing H and R. If it is an accent of the same language, I find slang is the best way to convey it. Don't overdo it, obviously, but it gets the point across. And if they are natives of a different language, I go with odd phrasings. Like, in a word that uses 'the' in front of every noun, have the character say things like "I love the cheese" when "I love cheese" makes more sense; even then, though, I use it lightly.

[Map the Dragon]

This concern popped up twice in my novel...twice in terms that I actually felt like I wanted to or needed to address it. First, I make mention that there is a 'common' tongue that some or most are capable of speaking with a given region. I also mention that certain races speak other, specific languages. One character visits another empire and I say something like, "Then in perfect Thanten he said," etc.

But, twice I actually used some sort of accent/dialect formatting in typed English. One was a singular and rare occurence in my 436 pages when a man struggles with common and mixes up some word order with articles and pronouns. We're talking a line or two of text max. Another character (minor at that) was an experiment in my novel with dialect and my readers so far have responded favorably, but he does have a typed accent/dialect of note; I think it's easy to read, but who knows.

I agree with most of you in that if an author is too overbearing with these constructs, it can become confusing and distract readers.

[Jenna St. Hilaire]

I don't mind an occasional dropped letter, but th' cawnstant shortnin' an' destroyin' o' words gits my dander up. (Wow. It was hard just to write that.) But I do like it when a character is said to have an accent and then shows their dialect by word usage. If they don't do something a little different with their words, I won't usually hear an accent.

For instance: when Robert Jordan tells me that someone has an Illianer accent, and that person says "It do be raining," I hear an accent there. On the other hand, Taraboners are supposed to have accents as well, but I've never noticed that they speak differently. Therefore, they sound like everyone else. Which isn't annoying, exactly, just not overly helpful.

Honestly, if the showing of dialect and accent is not overdone, I'm not going to be bothered by it.

[CicadaGrrl]

The advice that I got from my proffs, and that I stand by: mangling syntax not only takes a reader out of the story, but if you don't watch out you'll sound like you are making a certain ethnicity stupid. It can easily get racist. That's harder in fantasy, but still.

I only have one book with accents, but it matters as that one is the imperialist slave owners, and the other is the slaves. One of the protagonists, a slave, has been taught the ruling speech patterns. I handle it by describing the two languages when it comes up, as I've been taught to do. The ruling class sounds nasal, and has cropped vowel sounds. The slaves tend to speak with a click and a hiss. Once I've established the extent of how someone sounds to a main character, I usually don't revisit the description unless it would be noticed in a particular situation. Like the character I mentioned earlier having her accent slip.

[Map the Dragon]

I think it all simply comes down to purpose. Judge wisely. Is there a reason for the inclusion? If not, it's perhaps better avoided. If you just want a character to sound different, there are possibly other means to achieve this goal. But, go with your instincts and do what is best for you/your narrative.

[JoanofArch]

I used to play with phonetics, until I got bored of typing all that (and got bored with reading it in other books). I think it's enough to say early on that so and so has a particular accent, and then let the reader apply it to the dialogue in their head should they choose. Vocabulary will be different from character to character, which will be enough to remind the reader of the ethnic differences between characters. I think Susanna Clark did this with some of her Northern characters in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.