How to Write an Accent

There is much debate about the proper use of accents in writing. Some people swear "Just don't DO it, ever." Others say it's okay if you know how it sounds. Different accents can be confusing, or enhance the work.

This thread is for discussing accents of any kind in fiction writing.

I'm going to be using some accents in my novel this year, primarily many of the Scottish ones because I know how most of them sound {plus, it helps that I know how the words should look when writing in Scots}. In most cases I think it's a good idea to know how different accents warp the grammar of the language you're writing in, because when you pay attention, that's the thing that will sell it more than using the slang will.

Personally I try sounding out the sentence in the accent I'm attempting to write, sure it makes me look completely insane when I do it in public, but hearing rather than just thinking it will help immensely.

I'm going to be using an accent and I don't actually write out the different speech patterns so much as comment on how they sound to other characters. When introducing a character, I will take the time to describe the accent and set it to a region so that the user has some idea of what I'm talking about. I will writing in dialect a bit, though.

If I'm describing a Texan accent (which is different form a Southern accent) I'll talk about the way that the character's voice twangs and how he drawls out the words. It gets a bit harder when talking about accents you've only heard in passing and that the reader isn't remotely familiar with, though.

Whenever I have characters with accents (at least, ones that I'm not extremely familiar with), I write it the way I think it would be phrased and add the info about the accent in speech tags. Then I have someone who knows the accent and dialect really well look over it. I think mostly, what words they use or don't use, or how someone phrases things are as important as the sounds of the words they speak.

It's one of these things that isn't really right or wrong - but it's generally out of fashion right now. It can often seem patronising (look at the funny foreigner/lower class people) or like it's trying too hard - like it's so authentic it's unintelligible even to readers who have that accent!

I personally think that the key is less dropping letters, or writing it phonetically, but rather getting the rythyms of the speech right, and getting the mistakes right. Whether that's the dialect or the mistakes someone speaking a language different than their own makes.

I really dislike when people write out accents. If you say so-and-so has an accent, I will believe you. It doesn't help immerse me further into the story, it actually pulls me entirely out of it while I try to figure out what word you are trying to convey.

As an example, I once read an entire Highland romance novel where the Scottish hero had the full thick accent and the French heroine had a perfectly rendered English. I almost didn't finish even though I liked the book just because of that.

I guess an important thing when writing an accent for characters who speak another lanuage is to have some knowledge of that language. I don't just mean if a 'w' sounds like a 'v', but grammer rules too; someone with perfect pronunciation may well get the wrong verb form, tense, or word order. Someone who speaks German might be used to saying 'um fit zu bleiben, spiele ich jeden Tag Tennis, obwohl ich es langweilig finde' which is prettymuch 'in order fit to stay, play I every day Tennis, although I boring find it'. While they would undoubtedly correct most of this, some might slip through. (By the way, German is my second language and I am only a beginner, so there might be an error in that sentance.)

I second the idea that grammar and word use are better indicators of accent than phonetic spellings. I think there's too much variety in the way a person can phoneticize(?) an accent and the intent gets lost very, VERY quickly. It doesn't bother me as much in humorous or children's stories (like the Redwall series) because, in those cases, it isn't meant to be taken to seriously and those characters tend to serve as humorous foils. I won't comment on the rightness/wrongness of that, I'm just saying it happens.

A more serious or "grown up" story can probably get away with mistranslated idioms, occasional native language use, grammar or phrasing that is typically only used by non-native English speakers. Examples that come to mind are
"It is, how you say, {such and such thing}?"
"Si, that's what I meant."
"I do not think that word means what I think it means."

Granted, I live in the midwest and don't speak to non-native English speakers on a daily basis so I can't think of many specific examples, but I hope I'm conveying what I mean.

I side with the grammar and word use side. I can only think of one book that I've ever read in which I liked written out accents, and it was from a minor character.

Even if a writer knows the accent inside and out and writes it well, it can still be very hard to read on the page.

I find written out accents extremely annoying and distracting. Example: "Imma goin' out ter warsh ma shart." Gag.

However, I don't find there is anything wrong with narrarating the accent to give the reader a clue the speaker has an accent.
Example: "I'm going out to wash my shirt," Billy Joe said. His accent was so thick he pronounced 'wash' as 'warsh.'"

Alternatively, you can clue the reader in to the speaker's accent through the use of specific vocabulary. For example, Steven King's books usually take place in Maine, and there is a distinctive accept people from Maine have. He clues his readers in by having the characters use words like 'Ayup' for yes, which isn't something you hear elsewhere.

But if it's not really critical to the story, just say in passing that the character has whatever accent he has, placing no more importance on it that your description of what he looks like or what he's wearing, etc.

I like to use accents and dialects because I have to differentiate between characters of different nationalities and regions who don't always understand each other. If it were written in very standardized English, it would make no sense to the reader when one doesn't understand another.

I think with dialect, less is more. Doing it a little adds some flavour; doing it too much makes it unreadable. You're not writing speech, you're writing dialogue. It's always stylised. Suggestion rather than exactness is the key IMHO.

This is something I'm still struggling to figure out how to approach this November considering almost every one of my novel's principal cast speaks English as a foreign language to varying degrees of success, (either badly or just horrifically) since it's set in a language school.

I think with some characters particularly the main I'm going to avoid accents altogether because all though he is Pakastani born and does not speak English that well the story is from HIS point of view and in his mind his English is flawless, I think that this could also provide a humorous way of conveying to a reader his bemusement when native speakers of English cannot understand a word he's saying.

As for the support cast, a lot of them start the story as virtually incomprehensible so both the reader and the MC aren't exactly MEANT to be able to properly understand them but as the stories and their classes progress then I might drop the use of accents and simply rely on different sentence structures.

I can understand why it would grate on people, but i honestly think in some cases like mine its kinda necessary.

I think it's more important to get the dialect right rather than the accent. (Some people might think they're the same thing; they're not. Dialect is the words and grammar that are used, and accent is the pronounciation.)

Rather than typing out words phonetically the way that they'd pronounce it, I think it'd be better to do it more sublty. The words and phrases someone uses can suggest that they're from a different place. But don't do it to the point that people will have no idea what they're saying.

I agree with what Annababy said about adding something like "he pronounced ___ like ___." I read a book recently in which the author did this and I think it worked quite well.

Personally, I don't like it. If you're going to do it, you REALLY need to know your stuff, inside and out. I recently read part of THE HELP and found her employment of accents and dialects weak and annoying, so I lost interest in the book after less than 20 pages.

For the love of everything, DO NOT use dialects and accents if you don't have to.

I use acents when it helps the character seem real.
In a story I wrote, one of my characters was an older man, very poor, uneducated, and sort of a simpleton.
I didnt want to just say those things about him, I wanted to show them. so I used his dialouge to show these items. He spoke in poor broken English, his sentences were often incomplete and not pollished, and he used words such as dun, yer, and such. I didn't go overboard, but I used them in his dialouge to show these key items about his personality. Now, he was also a minor character so the reader would only have to deal with his broken English and slang for a short period of time, but I still used acents and I probably will have at least one character with some sort of a flourish or acent to his or her speaking in my story for this November.

The use of a phoenetically written accent bugs the hell out of me and will usually stop me reading a book. Dialect on the other hand I think is important. Someone mentioned writing Scots, I would find it so irritating to have to read English in a Scottish accent but I would find it very strange to have a Scottish person whose dialogue was written in standard English rather than a Scottish dialect. I think dialect is a far better way to show an accent than to write in the accent itself. And sometimes I have seen pheonetically written accents used as an excuse for the author not to use the correct dialect, they just use standard English written weirdly. That winds me right up.

I have no problem with little things like dropped G's, or with certain common mispellings like "gotta" etc. - but at some point, it just gets distracting and hard to read.

The more intensely you're going to render the accent, the more you need to actually KNOW it. If you don't know the difference between a Kentuckian, a Tennesseean and a Texan, you may find your readers have to correct you. Loudly, and rather twangily. =D (/personal petpeeve)

I don't personally think I could pull it off, but it can be done fantastically. Off the top of my head, Irvine Welsh. It's difficult to get through, and I know some people who gave up on it altogether, but there's no way Trainspotting would have been the same without the Scottish accent. I just had to read it out loud and extremely slowly to make heads or tails of it. :D

My opinion is that if you KNOW what the accents are supposed to sound like, then yeah, go ahead and spell the dialogue that way. If not, either brush up on your knowledge by listening to native speakers with their accents (which shouldn't be too hard, considering how we have access to the internet these days) or just don't write them down and have the narrator comment on how it's supposed to sound.