Capturing Accents in Dialogue

Great Question!

I'm interested in the answer to this as well, so I hope someone more expert than I will come along and answer it.

But if you'd like my two cents worth, subtle is definitely the way to go. Using funny spelling to indicate dialect and accents is considered very cheesy, according to the masters. So no "Ve haff given you varning!" for the German-speakers. But I think you knew that.

Rhythm and diction are the answer, apparently. That is, the words they choose, their length and the order in which they contruct syntax convey these differences. Easier said than done, I say.

I think it involves a lot of listening. At least that's what works for me, but I've had quite a bit of experience listening to non-anglophones speak English, and so I try to remember how they talk. They typically use simpler words, depending on how fluent their English is, but what constitutes simpler may not be obvious. Many common English words are short, but they're of Anglo-Saxon derivation and irregular, so some people will choose longer latinate words that have cognates in many European languages, or maybe verbs with simple conjugations. Though a German might find those short words familiar.

Also I've noticed that people tend to carry over their own grammar when speaking foreign languages so that they may say things that are technically correct, but are odd choices. Russians, for instance, seem to use lots of progressive tenses. Instead of "We'll get together at five" they might say "At five we are getting together." I think that has something to do with the use of imperfective tenses in Russki yazik.

So my advice would be to listen to people from the nationalities in question enough to get a good feel for each one. Then you'd have to imagine how each character talks in your head, and work on that until you can tell what he or she would say versus what doesn't sound right. You'll probably have to read your dialogue out loud at some point to get this. Hard work! But as you get to know your characters better it should go faster. And just like real people they may sometimes surprise you.

Again, I'll be looking for advice or tricks of the trade from a real pro. But this seems like something different writers handle differently, and when people find ways to do it that work it's impressive. To other writers at least. So you may discover a way that will have us all slapping our foreheads and saying, "Why didn't I think of that?"

Try this:

"I have a question, Herr Patel," the German scientist said. His clipped accent was pronounced and to Patel it sounded like Professor Siemens had said he "halfed a kavestion", but Patel had no problem understanding the German's meaning.

"Please ask your question, Sir." Patel's own accent was so formal and so obviously British that the others were surprised. They had expected him to speak with the sing-song accent of Dr. Sharma and the Pakistani Captain, but Patel had obviously grown up closer to Dunhill than to New Dehli.

You have now given distinctively accented voices to four characters. Trust your readers to provide the accents for the rest of your book, and they will not disappoint you. Whenever Patel speaks, he will sound Brit to your readers...

Patel said, "Indeed, Sir. What would ever give you that idea?"

Just as an aside, I'm probably not to useful in this area, but I was watching "Lost" the other day where one of the characters is British.

Rather than saying, "I haven't seen it," like any American I've heard, he said: "I've not seen it." I pointed it out to the person I was viewing with, because it caught me as something very British.

Like others said, rather than spell out the accent, try to work with the syntax.

Hagrid's talking in HP is spot on, and there are commas and spelling changes everywhere. It always makes me chuckle, though, imagining American parents reading it to their kids when neither of them have heard a west-country accent in their lives.

Mark Pettus:With all due respect, those paragraphs would be enough to make me stop reading and reach for a rejection slip. Writers should just do the speech patterns and syntax, and the manners to go with them. If that isn't enough, it's probably because the writer doesn't have a very good ear, in which case they'd make a complete mess out of complex phonetic descriptions anyway.

HapiSofi said:

Mark Pettus:

With all due respect, those paragraphs would be enough to make me stop reading and reach for a rejection slip. Writers should just do the speech patterns and syntax, and the manners to go with them. If that isn't enough, it's probably because the writer doesn't have a very good ear, in which case they'd make a complete mess out of complex phonetic descriptions anyway.​

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Why is it that any sentence that begins with "With all due respect" leaves me feeling like Rodney Dangerfield?


I find that most writers, even enormously talented wordsmiths, cannot do foreign syntax well. The same is true for street slang, southern accents, and particularly Texas accents (y'all should know, mine is natural). My two paragraphs may clunk along like an old Studebaker, but if it were my story instead of rosewood's, those two paragraphs would be the last time I would deal with the nationality and accents of my characters in dialogue. Tell your reader that Gunter is German and trust your reader. They know what a German sounds like when he speaks English.

If you have the ear for foreign syntax necessary to use it throughout an entire novel, by all means do so. Tom Wolfe would be proud. If you don't have that ear, and most of us don't, Less is More.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.