Wednesday DE: Ooh me accent's slippin'

[angry_friendship_wolf]

How does your character speak? What accent or dialect do they use, are they formal or very informal in the way they talk, do they have any verbal tics, etc?

Comments

[shinyhappygoth]

Enzo: "Unaccented" North American accent, very informal with lots of computer-based slang. Dialect can be a little weird on occasion due to the show being created by Brits in Canada. Canon quotes include "Can you repeat that? In plain DOS?" and Enzo complaining about his Ancient Languages class: "COBOL? Fortran? They're dinosaurs!" When Milliways' auto-translator was malfunctioning, I had him speak in vaguely C-family pseudocode.

Zecora: Speaks Ponish as a second language, distinct African accent but very understandable, always in rhyming couplets. Native language unknown; since I have declared her to be from Zebrabwe, I'd like to pun on Shona somehow, but if I'm allowed to stray away from Africa entirely, the best pun would be Zebrew.

[bjornwilde]

Tybalt, thanks to Mary Robinette Kowal's narration, has a very specific accent in my head. It is very polished, though I can't say where it's from. He also speaks very deliberately and will pause for dramatic tension. I'd venture to say it's a very theater-style in that I can easily see him on stage and with minimal effort project to the back seats.

Jessica has an English accent which I would say seems Middle Class, though I know nothing of the various English accents. She doesn't seem posh to me regardless. There's usually a hint of mocking or tenseness to her voice.

Aside from that, I got nothing

[death_gone_mad]

Amascut's accent is vaguely North African/Levantine. Can't really narrow it down more than that because fantasy portrayal of a mishmash middle eastern culture IN SPAAAACE on another planet in another multiverse entirely. There is a very light sprinkling of Eartha Kitt's portrayal of Catwoman, but she isn't constantly dropping cat puns. She's just very deliberate about her tone of voice.

Feline growling when she is annoyed is a thing she does, but purring not so much. Lionesses don't purr, after all.


As for Fairy Fixit, I have no idea other than fast and jargony. Who knows what magic moon fairies sound like anyway? I am half-tempted to say she sounds like a more southern Dr. Jemma Simmons because the canon was developed by a bunch of folks from Cambridgeshire.

[lionlike_tabby]

McGonagall: She's posh Scottish, so it's a very nice, refined Edinburgh accent, clipped and rather formal, which she maintains even through high emotion, because spells don't work (or, worse, work in unintended ways) if one doesn't enunciate. No particular tics, beyond the very occasional 'och' - which I hardly ever type out, because I always think it sounds awkward and hamfisted.


Molly: SO California, like, oh my God. Like soooo Cali, you know? Especially when she's doing it to annoy people she thinks ought to be annoyed. Verbal tics include 'like', 'dude' and 'freaking'. Not surprisingly, she sounds very informal, though she almost never swears much above 'damn'.

(She actually can do a nice, TV-friendly generic American accent, thanks to her time with the X-Men. She just mostly doesn't, because it's not her. She's been known to deploy it as a weapon when underestimated by people who assume she's thick, though.)


Sam: His accent is established very early on in his canon as unplaceably British. Is he English? Is he Welsh? Is he Scottish? Irish? WHO THE HELL KNOWS!

He doesn't have any tics; it'd be too much of a giveaway as he flits between languages and identities.

[i_am_your_host]

Emcee's Milliways default language is English with a German accent. Personally I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference among regional German accents, but there is definitely a Berlin accent, which is what he has. I imagine it would be more working class, although he does speak rather formally. I've allowed him to gradually use more contractions as he spent more time in Milliways, and to move away from the sort of stereotypical campiness that's associated with imitation German accents. But sometimes he does slip in phrases like "it will be most entertaining," or switches word order, like "You are coming to the party, ja?" instead of "Are you coming to the party?" (I think this is a European language thing. I've heard my older Dutch relatives speak English like this.)

Cassidy speaks with an Irish accent, the accuracy of which is highly debatable according to actual Irish people who watch Preacher (the actor is Northern English). Some say it's spot-on, some say it's only passable for American TV. So what I'm taking away from this is that his accent has morphed over the 100+ years he's been alive (I would assume that the Dublin accent from the early 1900s isn't the same as today's), but it's still thick, rural, and working class. He speaks very informally, using 'like' and 'y'know' a lot. In the beginning I used to type the accent out until I annoyed myself, and eventually eased up on dropping every single 'g'. Depending on the flow of the sentence, I stick in a 'me' instead of 'my,' or an 'aye' instead of a 'yeah.'

Pam consciously switches accents depending on who she's talking to. Her Deep Southern drawl is for everybody except Eric; she drops it almost completely every time she speaks to Eric in private...or when she's really upset about something. She's probably taken on several accents as an adaptation to her environment, though her normal speaking voice is standard American. Which in itself is an adaptation of sorts, as she's lost her British accent, having been born in London's high society.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato, rather unsurprisingly, speaks with a Tokyo dialect, but he specifically speaks with a rougher variant of it: He trills his 'R's, slurs his vowels slightly, geminates his consonants, and defaults to both very informal language usage (including almost never using honorifics unless he's doing so derisively) and quite hostile language usage, defaulting generally to harsher, more unfriendly pronoun usage for other people.

This is much more pronounced when he's eleven compared to when he's eighteen, at which point he scales it back some to 'rude, but not necessarily hyper-hostile.'

The effect is somewhat enhanced by the fact that while he talks quite quietly and even somewhat softly, he has a natural growl to his voice that he suppresses a little when he's trying to be friendly, and which becomes much more prominent when he's upset, angry, or defensive.

[chanter1944]

Sariel speaks English with a Lucian accent, which varies from gently audible to barely heard at all depending on where she is and what she's doing. It tends to lessen quite a lot when she's on duty or in that mindset - thanks, 'Fleet - so that she sounds, to those unfamiliar, almost like a north American of some sort with a hint of... something in her voice that's hard to place. (That detail is down to her actor, who is American.) Her Kweyol is unmistakable, if you're familiar with the sound of it and where it's from. She tends to be more formal than not when she speaks, which is especially evident in English, and often deliberate about her enunciation and word choice, though not obnoxiously so.

[takethatnature]

Canonically Wilson is voiced by a muted trumpet (it's been mistaken for a harmonica but it's a trumpet with a few different kinds of mutes), which gives me a vague idea of the pitch and character of his voice but nothing too specific. I've personally decided that he has a fairly generic northeastern American accent, which could be the result of deliberate effort on his or his parents' part to get rid of a more region-specific or even a foreign accent. (Klei's hinted that he could be a European immigrant.) He uses technical vocabulary occasionally and is no stranger to long or uncommon words, but also has a habit of describing things outside his field as 'noun-y' and overusing placeholder words like '[noun/adjective] thing'. He can be formal if he tries but is instinctively pretty blunt.

Thurlow is upper middle class and grew up in Liverpool in the mid to late nineteenth century, so their accent is old-fashioned Received Pronunciation with an occasional stray phoneme. I write them as being a little more verbose and indirect than they need to be to get a point across, because it fits the narration style of their canon better. (The player character's dialogue is pretty much entirely paraphrased by the narration. So is a lot of NPC dialogue, actually.)

The social norm in Aradia and Cirava's culture is for low-status people to use precise, technical vocabulary and high-status people to use much more slang, informal speech, and idiosyncratic ways of saying things, because they've had universal education for millennia and they have an agglutinatively structured language where gluing word roots for fairly generic concepts together and maybe garnishing it with some modifiers can produce plenty of specific terminology without needing a unique base word that's less recyclable. This is why "toilet" is the fancy highblood term for what a lowblood calls a "load gaper", to use a canon example. There's also "bathtub" versus "ablution trap" but the latter is kind of just a more obscure and violent-sounding version of the former in English if you think about it.

Aradia's own manner of speech is pretty low-key compared to many of her friends; before her resurrection she had a low-effort typing quirk (replacing the letter O with a zero) and now she doesn't even use that, and while she can be blunt she doesn't use tons of puns or weird sentence structures. She's in the middle of the formal versus informal scale, I'd say, but closer to the formal side.

Cirava on the other hand has a thoroughly informal manner of speech, but not in an obfuscating way that would come across as putting on airs, they're just very casual and apathetic. They have "lmao" as a verbal tic in canon but I erred on the side of rendering that non-literally because saying the acronym out loud as often as Cirava uses it in their dialogue seems like it would be weird enough for the viewpoint character to comment on, which they don't.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

This got long, so I made it its own comment.

Bastion's primary native language is omnicode, which does not have regional accents or dialects, although omnics from different countries do have different accents when they speak human languages. I could maybe see regional omnicode slang, but not a full dialect. It's a little misleading to refer to their native language in the singular without qualifiers, because they rolled off the assembly line fluent in like half a dozen languages commonly spoken in Germany in case they needed to intercept human communications (language packs are easy to install during construction). German has priority over English in their systems, but they hear humans and other organic beings speaking English in Milliways because, as the common language of Watchpoint: Gibraltar, it's what they expect to hear.

The principles behind their manner of speech are that they should use correct grammar, but make their point in as few words as possible, and every word in a sentence should have a purpose and be the best word for that purpose. It's okay if the purpose is politeness or conveying a specific detail or grammatical connective tissue or something like that, as long as it has one. They have no problem with speaking informally but their adherence to standard grammatical rules makes them sound moderately formal by default, and they make a deliberate effort to be polite quite a bit of the time because they want to make a good impression.

They also have no concept of some words being more difficult to understand or more fancy than others because they were programmed with all the words simultaneously, and they don't need to optimise down to the syllable level, so this focus on conciseness doesn't discourage them from using long words. Bastion also doesn't use slang and rarely uses metaphorical language, not because they don't understand it but because they never formed the habit and don't see why they should start.

This is all Millicanon, by the way. Canon recently introduced in-game subtitles, and all of Bastion's lines are captioned with things like (upbeat greeting), (irritated beep), and (surprised denial) rather than direct translations.