#accents

[batfambrainrotbeloved]

Doctor Leslie Thompkins now has a thick Jersey accent because god forbid women have anything

(also because nothing infruriates me more than people who "sound dumb" just because they don't have a posh british or Yale accent- BUT SHES A DOCTOR SO NO ONE CAN SAY SHIT)

[silliestcreature196]

I ignore Dub VS Sub discourse and debate like the plague

and I've been watching Dunmeshi in english But why, oh God why, are the orcs NOT FUCKING COCKNEY??? Sure, the dub by and large is almost scarily Britn't But come on dude...

[acrowseye]

i'm conducting an experiment. everyone who's from an english speaking country state your country, regional area and what you call the following images. i need to see something

[bemusedlybespectacled]

PLEASE reblog, I have heard it on a couple of podcasts now and I'm genuinely curious how common it is! Also, if you feel comfortable with it, let me know what your accent normally is (Midwestern, Southern, New Englander, New Yorker, Minnesotan, whatever).

[prokopetz]

Apart from the usual "aboot" business, a thing that I've noticed about American perceptions of Canadian accents is that Americans love to misidentify accents from other parts of America as Canadian accents. I once had an American dude insist to me that a particular YouTuber had an obvious Canadian accent, and when I looked them up, it turns out they were born and raised in fucking Florida.

[bodhrancomedy]

It is phenomenal how many times we had to explain this as kids.

[writingwithcolor]

Not all Second-Language Speakers are Made Equal.

@waltzshouldbewriting asked:

Hello! I’m writing a story that features a character who’s first language is not English. He’s East African, specifically from Nairobi, Kenya, and is pretty fluent in English but it’s not his primary language, and he grew up speaking Swahili first. I’m struggling to figure out if it’s appropriate or in character to show him forgetting English words or grammar. From what I’ve researched, English is commonly spoken in Nairobi, but it wouldn’t be what was most spoken in his home. For context, this is an action/superhero type story, so he (and other characters) are often getting tired, stressed, and emotional. He also speaks more than two languages, so it makes sense to me that it would be easier to get confused, especially in a language that wasn’t his first. But I’m worried about ending up into stereotypes or tropes. For additional context: I’m monolingual, I’ve tried to learn a second language and it’s hard. A lot of how I’m approaching this comes from my own challenges correctly speaking my own, first and only language.

Diversity in Second-Language English

You seem to have an underlying assumption that second language acquisition happens the same for everyone. 

The way your character speaks English depends on so many unknown factors: 

Where does your story take place? You mention other characters; are they also Kenyan, or are they all from different countries?

Assuming the setting is not Kenya, is English the dominant language of your setting? 

How long has your character lived in Kenya vs. where he is now? 

What are his parents’ occupations? 

What level of schooling did he reach in Nairobi before emigrating? 

What type of school(s) did he go to, public or private? Private is more likely than you think. 

Did his schooling follow the national curriculum structure or a British one? Depends on school type and time period. 

Does he have familiarity with Kenyan English, or only the British English taught in school? 

Is this a contemporary setting with internet and social media?

I bring up this list not with the expectation that you should have had all of this in your ask, but to show you that second language acquisition of English, postcolonial global English acquisition in particular, is complex. 

My wording is also intentional: the way your character speaks English. To me, exploring how his background affects what his English specifically looks like is far more culturally interesting to me than deciding whether it makes him Good or Bad at the language. 

L2 Acquisition and Fluency

But let’s talk about fluency anyway: how expressive the individual is in this language, and adherence to fundamental structural rules of the language.

Fun fact: Japanese is my first language. The language I’m more fluent in today? English. Don’t assume that an ESL individual will be less fluent in English compared to their L1 counterparts on the basis that 1) it’s their second language, or 2) they don’t speak English at home. 

There’s even a word for this—circumstantial bilingualism, where a second language is acquired by necessity due to an individual’s environment. The mechanisms of learning and outcomes are completely different. 

You said you tried learning a second language and it was hard. You cannot compare circumstantial bilingualism to a monolingual speaker’s attempts to electively learn a second language. 

Motivations?

I understand that your motivation for giving this character difficulties with English is your own personal experience. However, there are completely different social factors at play.

The judgments made towards a native speaker forgetting words or using grammar differently are rooted in ableism and classism (that the speaker must be poor, uneducated, or unintelligent). That alone is a hefty subject to cover. And I trust you to be able to cover that!

But on top of that, for a second language speaker, it’s racism and xenophobia, which often lend themselves to their own ableist or classist assumptions (that those of the speaker’s race/ethnicity must be collectively unintelligent, that they are uneducated or low class due to the occupations where they could find work, or conversely that they are snobby and isolationist and can't be bothered to learn a new language). Intersections, intersections.

If you want to explore your experiences in your writing, give a monolingual English speaker in your cast a learning disability or some other difficulty learning language, whatever you most relate with. And sure, multilingual folks can occasionally forget words like anyone else does, or think of a word in one language and take a second to come up with it in the other language. But do not assume that multilinguals, immigrants, or multiethnic individuals inherently struggle with English or with multiple languages just because you do.

~ Rina

[incognitopolls]

For example, switching from the accent of your current location to the accent your parents have/that you grew up around.

–

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Writing Advice #?: Don’t write out accents.

The Surface-Level Problem: It’s distracting at best, illegible at worst. 

The following passage from Sons and Lovers has never made a whit of sense to me:

“I ham, Walter, my lad,’ ’e says; ‘ta’e which on ’em ter’s a mind.’ An’ so I took one, an’ thanked ’im. I didn’t like ter shake it afore ’is eyes, but ’e says, ‘Tha’d better ma’e sure it’s a good un. An’ so, yer see, I knowed it was.’”

There’s almost certainly a point to that dialogue — plot, character, theme — but I could not figure out what the words were meant to be, and gave up on the book.  At a lesser extreme, most of Quincey’s lines from Dracula (“I know I ain’t good enough to regulate the fixin’s of your little shoes”) cause American readers to sputter into laughter, which isn’t ideal for a character who is supposed to be sweet and tragic.  Accents-written-out draw attention to mechanical qualities of the text.

Solution #1: Use indicators outside of the quote marks to describe how a character talks.  An Atlanta accent can be “drawling” and a London one “clipped”; a Princeton one can sound “stiff” and a Newark one “relaxed.”  Do they exaggerate their vowels more (North America) or their consonants more (U.K., north Africa)?  Do they sound happy, melodious, frustrated?

The Deeper Problem: It’s ignorant at best, and classist/racist/xenophobic at worst.

You pretty much never see authors writing out their own accents — to the person who has the accent, the words just sound like words.  It’s only when the accent is somehow “other” to the author that it gets written out.

And the accents that we consider “other” and “wrong” (even if no one ever uses those words, the decision to deliberately misspell words still conveys it) are pretty much never the ones from wealthy and educated parts of the country.  Instead, the accents with misspelled words and awkward inflection are those from other countries, from other social classes, from other ethnicities.  If your Maine characters speak normally and your Florida characters have grammatical errors, then you have conveyed what you consider to be correct and normal speech.  We know what J.K. Rowling thinks of French-accented English, because it’s dripping off of Fleur Delacour’s every line.

At the bizarre extreme, we see inappropriate application of North U.K. and South U.S.-isms to every uneducated and/or poor character ever to appear in fan fic.  When wanting to get across that Steve Rogers is a simple Brooklyn boy, MCU fans have him slip into “mustn’t” and “we is.”  When conveying that Robin 2.0 is raised poor in Newark, he uses “ain’t” and “y’all” and “din.”  Never mind that Iron Man is from Manhattan, or that Robin 3.0 is raised wealthy in Newark; neither of them ever gets a written-out accent.

Solution #2: A little word choice can go a long way, and a little research can go even further.  Listen carefully to the way people talk — on the bus, in a café, on unscripted YouTube — and write down their exact word choice.  “We good” literally means the same thing as “no thank you,” but one’s a lot more formal than the other.  “Ain’t” is a perfectly good synonym for “am not,” but not everyone will use it.

The Obscure Problem: It’s not even how people talk.

Look at how auto-transcription software messes up speaking styles, and it’s obvious that no one pronounces every spoken sound in every word that comes out of their mouth.  Consider how Americans say “you all right?”; 99% of us actually say something like “yait?”, using tone and head tilt to convey meaning.  Politicians speak very formally; friends at bars speak very informally.

An example: I’m from Baltimore, Maryland.  Unless I’m speaking to an American from Texas, in which case I’m from “Baltmore, Marlind.”  Unless I’m speaking to an American from Pennsylvania, in which case I’m from “Balmore, Marlin.”  If I’m speaking to a fellow Marylander, I’m of course from “Bamor.”  (If I’m speaking to a non-American, I’m of course from “Washington D.C.”)  Trying to capture every phoneme of change from moment to moment and setting to setting would be ridiculous; better just to say I inflect more when talking to people from outside my region.

When you write out an accent, you insert yourself, the writer, as an implied listener.  You inflict your value judgments and your linguistic ear on the reader, and you take away from the story.

Solution #3: When in doubt, just write the dialogue how you would talk.

[high-quality-tiktoks]

Can you tell I’m in Boston rn?

[todayontumblr]

Wednesday May 24.

Cows have regional accents

MooooooooooooÖ

Allow us to broaden your minds for one moment. We know what you're thinking—I love cows, but I simply have to know: do they moo in different accents to one another? It is a great question, and you would be far from the first person to have posed yourself such a query. Well, the good news is here this Wednesday, May 24, as we have that very answer for you. They're chunky, lovely, and unrelenting milk machines: and now we can answer, definitively, whether #cows commoonicate (sorry) in different regional accents. Don't believe us? Well, we refer you to Exhibit A:

Exhibit A.

[runesinthenight]

Batfam accent headcanons

Bruce has a vaguely British accent. He sounds mostly American, but he was raised by a British butler and it shows.

Dick's accent doesn't have a name because he can't stick to one accent. He picked up bits and pieces of language from the different people in Haly's Circus as well as from different places the circus stopped over the years. Dick can and will used 10 different accents in one sentence.

Jason has the thickest Jersey accent. He sounds like Tony Soprano, which does womders for him as a crime boss. It also helps him connect with the people of Crime Alley because he sounds like he belongs.

Tim has a vaguely transatlantic accent because his parents wanted him to sound posh and sophisticated when they brought him to galas. It's still the voice he uses for meetings, interviews, galas, social functions, etc. He developed a more.standard American accent while training prior to becoming Robin so his accent couldn't tie them together.

Damian has an upper class Arabic accent. He was raised in the League of Assassins as the heir of the Demon Head. He was raised to believe he was better than everyone else. His accent reflects that. He sounds slightly more American as Robin, but not by much.

Babs and Steph also have Jersey accemts but they're not nearly as strong as Jason’s. Steph's accent is stronger than Babs's. I feel like Babs has the tiniest bit of New Yorker accent.

Cass doesn't speak much, but when she does she tends to mimic aspects of the person she's talking with's accent. She has a bit of a mish mash of accents that she stole from various Batfam members, but she's nowhere near as bad as Dick.

Duke has an accent somewhere between a Jersey accent and AAVE. It's distinctly different from Jason’s Jersey accent.

Alfred is British.

[acrowseye]

part 2 of my experiment: what english-speaking country are you from, what region and what do you call the following images? if you don't know what the first image is please try to guess i'd love to see it

[teaboot]

Hello, some time ago someone yet again assumed you were from USA and you drew a couple(?) Of comics where you were holding them up and swearing at them with a large set of words on your tshirt

And I don't remember what the words were but I know they were fun to say in what I hope is your accent, because most of the time I can't do an accent other than maybe British, but I've never been able to easily do anything from the Americas.

And something about that sentence flowed so well and so smoothly that it gripped me and I kept running through it over and over until my roomate walked in on me talking to myself in an accent.

I would like that experience again.

So could you please link those posts or something?

Be free, my friend

Also people in my area mostly sound like Americans on TV, bhut rilly ay'aint godda problum talkin more th'wey aye'du nach'rilly if aye'm chillin' out on'the back fordy an ain godt nuthin'a soun' fancee for, but ah thinkeye mitapicktitup frumeye mawm.

Jus' godda lean all slowen laysee enthe backa yor mouth, like yer leanin on a fencepost

[prokopetz]

I love it when Québécois people try to put on a funny Anglophone accent and suddenly they sound Texan. Like, buddy, you don't need to go all way across the continent to make fun of the anglos – Ontario is right next door, and their accent is much more ridiculous.

[bodhrancomedy]

I have a Northern Irish accent which is mad because I’ve never lived there, I wasn’t born there, I just grew up in a Northern Irish household in Scotland and once upon a time I had a wee Smoggy (NE English) accent which is hilarious to look back at as an adult.

And oh yeah, started going Deaf at 5.