Italian accents

nicotine027

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Hi all!

The story I'm working on right now has several main and minor Italian characters. The ones who speak English have a range of accent weights I guess you could say. One of the main characters has a particularly heavy Italian accent when he speaks English. How should I depict that? I've looked up websites that talk about the nuances of Italian accents, but it's quite hard for me to put them into practice as I don't have any Italian friends and don't hear the accent often.

Also, since the story is a serious, dark one, I don't one him to sound silly adding "-a" at the end of most of his words. His accent is part of his characterization in some respects, but part of me is getting a little frustrated with it. Should I try to depict it or just imply that it's there?
 

travelgal

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Do you specify which part of Italy they hail from, are is it set in say, America or Australia? Sicily? Rome? Assisi? Pesaro? Aquaville (where my grandparents are from, you won't find it on a map, and they spoke Yugoslav). Have you checked out youtube videos of travellers in Italy sampling food or whatever? Write down whatever impressions come to mind. Locals sound more excitable in Sicily and calmer in Assisi, for example.

I'd say imply it's there. Writing in accent makes the reader do too much work when they want to grab the meaning and get on with it.
 

Bacchus

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What Travelgirl says.

This is Don Corleone from the Godfather -
"Bonasera, we know each other for
years, but this is the first time
you come to me for help. I don't
remember the last time you invited
me to your house for coffee...even
though our wives are friends"

No "shaddap-a-ya-face" in there, but we've all heard it (or at least I'm sure most of us have!)
 

Zaffiro

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I have a huge Thing about this, but: please don't do phonetic accents, unless you're Irvine Welsh. From just about anyone else in the world, it always comes out as one great big heap of cringe.

Use the syntax, rather than the sounds. An Italian speaking English as an imperfect second language is going to have a heavy dose of Italian syntax in there. I can't think of any Italian examples offhand, but one standard Russian equivalent is to leave out the articles when you're writing a Russian speaking imperfect English, because Russian doesn't do articles. So 'I have a book' becomes 'I have book', and instantly you've shifted the rhythm of the speech and implied a Russian accent.
 

lonestarlibrarian

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I just finished reading "Five Red Herrings" by Dorothy Sayers. It's a timetable mystery, but pretty much every character has an accent. Most of them are Scottish; one character was Cockney; a few were British of various classes. It eventually got to the point where you either had to laugh at the wildly diverse way characters had of communicating with each other, or cry and put the book away rather than slogging through the accents. I have a mental image of Ms. Sayers, about 200 pages in, wondering why on earth she had decided to write most of her dialogue in dialect...

I'm about a quarter Italian-- my mom is half-Italian-- my maternal grandma's parents were both first-gen Italians. (One's family was from Piedmont, the other from Naples, so even they argued about how Italian should be spoken/taught.) See if you can find some good Youtube videos of first-generation Philadelphia/New Jersey Italians to get some grasp of the speech rhythms in English, or look at videos of real Italians speaking or arguing. But it goes beyond that to worldview--- the emphasis on family and hospitality; the gesticulation (even I can't talk if someone holds my hands still); the energy/enthusiasm/passion for whatever they've focused their attention on. Out of my immigrants/first gen Italian friends, relatives, and coworkers--- I don't necessarily remember their sentence structure or word choice, but I always remember the rhythm, and sort of a sibilant quality to their speech, if that makes sense.
 

Bufty

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If they were speaking English, I suspect you mainly remember rhythm because of the sentence structure and word choice regardless of any sibilant tendency.

To me, for reading - unless going for comedic delivery - sentence structure and word choice are far more preferable to phonetics for conveying English as spoken by French, English, Russian, German, Greek, Italian or Irish characters, or whatever. Simply knowing the character's nationality helps a reader imagine the spoken dialogue, too.

I just finished reading "Five Red Herrings" by Dorothy Sayers. It's a timetable mystery, but pretty much every character has an accent. Most of them are Scottish; one character was Cockney; a few were British of various classes. It eventually got to the point where you either had to laugh at the wildly diverse way characters had of communicating with each other, or cry and put the book away rather than slogging through the accents. I have a mental image of Ms. Sayers, about 200 pages in, wondering why on earth she had decided to write most of her dialogue in dialect...

I'm about a quarter Italian-- my mom is half-Italian-- my maternal grandma's parents were both first-gen Italians. (One's family was from Piedmont, the other from Naples, so even they argued about how Italian should be spoken/taught.) See if you can find some good Youtube videos of first-generation Philadelphia/New Jersey Italians to get some grasp of the speech rhythms in English, or look at videos of real Italians speaking or arguing. But it goes beyond that to worldview--- the emphasis on family and hospitality; the gesticulation (even I can't talk if someone holds my hands still); the energy/enthusiasm/passion for whatever they've focused their attention on. Out of my immigrants/first gen Italian friends, relatives, and coworkers--- I don't necessarily remember their sentence structure or word choice, but I always remember the rhythm, and sort of a sibilant quality to their speech, if that makes sense.
 

TellMeAStory

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Try the syntax thing and having your viewpoint character reflect on how terribly thick X'x accent is, how much more difficult it is to unscramble his meaning, how much more X sounds like a certain movie character, as if X has been in this country only a year, but its' been longer...that sort of thing.
 

neandermagnon

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I have a huge Thing about this, but: please don't do phonetic accents, unless you're Irvine Welsh. From just about anyone else in the world, it always comes out as one great big heap of cringe.

IMO, "even if you're Irvine Welsh" - I couldn't read Trainspotting.

But yeah, phonetically depicted accents are hard to read, annoying and when someone who has a different accent reads it, the phonics don't work, because they'll be reading it phonetically in their own accent, and it'll come across as ridiculous.

I agree with the above method of using word choice to depict accents, and you can also say in the dialogue tag what the accent is (the first time the character speaks... not every time!)

For example: "I ain't going south of the river this time of night," said the cabbie in broad cockney. (You may not need to say that it's cockney at all if you've already established that the MC's trying to get a cab to Brixton at 3am.)


The audio book of Trainspotting was good though, but Irving Welsh got that privilege because the film was good and the book had a ton of good reviews. Most writers will just get the "put back on shelf and forget about book" response.
 

Zaffiro

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I loved Trainspotting, but I know it's not everyone's thing :)

The Goldfinch has great examples of accent done right. She never goes phonetic, but you can hear Boris's Australo-Ukrainian accent perfectly. Partly it's the sentence structure, but partly it's the rhythms - things like 'But yes! I did!' give you the uplift and emphasis of the accent - and the things that almost-but-not-quite translate, like Boris calling the shop 'the magazine' and all chocolate bars being 'Nestlé bar'. And you can tell from the syntax and vocabulary that Grisha's accent is much heavier than Boris's, even though it's never stated outright.
 

braveboy

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If they were speaking English, I suspect you mainly remember rhythm because of the sentence structure and word choice regardless of any sibilant tendency.

To me, for reading - unless going for comedic delivery - sentence structure and word choice are far more preferable to phonetics for conveying English as spoken by French, English, Russian, German, Greek, Italian or Irish characters, or whatever. Simply knowing the character's nationality helps a reader imagine the spoken dialogue, too.

I agree with the idea of rhythm. my ex and I met and married in Pozzuoli,(Naples) and didn't travel back to the states for the next nine years. but we had an accord. in Italy we would speak Italian.
when we did go to the States, she would learn English. worked out well in fact. she learned it and will always have an accent, but there was none of the exaggerated "A" endings as seen in comedic movies and stories. but the rhythm and hand gestures are there. different for my daughter though, learned english as third language, but was still a child when we brought her to the states, so she grew up
speaking English, sounding like the six o'clock news.. no accent or inflection what so ever. Of course if she's in a group of Italians, she's pure Napolitana. lol
Doug
 

Al X.

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I have a huge Thing about this, but: please don't do phonetic accents, unless you're Irvine Welsh. From just about anyone else in the world, it always comes out as one great big heap of cringe.

Use the syntax, rather than the sounds. An Italian speaking English as an imperfect second language is going to have a heavy dose of Italian syntax in there. I can't think of any Italian examples offhand, but one standard Russian equivalent is to leave out the articles when you're writing a Russian speaking imperfect English, because Russian doesn't do articles. So 'I have a book' becomes 'I have book', and instantly you've shifted the rhythm of the speech and implied a Russian accent.

That is a valid point. One of my main characters in my series is a Russian woman. She has book. She drives car. An Italian character? That individual is going to speak proper English. Same with my Mexican characters. Colloquialisms will rule the dialect.