Comments on: Abusing the Language – Using Accents in Roleplay

By: Honnete

Honnete — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:10:43 +0000

I’ve been speaking – well, typing – as Honnete for so long I sometimes find myself slipping into her turns of speech in OOC as well. Or with my other characters, which is not a good idea! I actually thought orcs talked like trolls to start with when I started playing Horde….. so then I had to retcon Honn’s background to explain the outrageous trollish accent.

Vonka doesn’t have much of an individual accent, other than the nastiness and the colourful little epithets for races other than Forsaken. But that’s a voice (or that’s how I’d describe it) rather than a speech pattern.

Waterspeaker learned orcish as an adult, and mostly from books. her phraseology is rather formal.

But I’m really having difficulty developing a ‘voice’ for Deanathrae as yet, which is one reason she’s not been levelled much. I know that her Common was rather formal (her Darnassian was fluent, of course), but then she would have had to learn Thalassian (from being mistakenly put in with blood elves) and THEN orcish. I assume her orcish would be extremely broken. It’s hard to get a feel for how she’d talk, given that and the whole Arthas Death Knight thing. She wouldn’t be likely to want to talk to anyone very much – but she would have very little ability to do so, either.

By: Linedan

Linedan — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:38:20 +0000

Beltar’s accent was a challenge for me when I started off…I wanted it to be a little different than standard “Scottish dwarf.” With his background as being from a relatively remote, faraway mining settlement, followed by nearly a century wandering the Eastern Kingdoms, mostly between human settlements, I ended up taking the normal Blizzard dwarven and toning it back a bit, then tossing in just a tiny bit of Tarquin/Aely/Bricu-style Northron, and mellowing it out with more conventional Stormwind common. The phrasing he uses is a mish-mash of Southern cadences I heard growing up in rural central Virginia, a little bit of South Carolina Lowcountry (which is an accent I adore), and a teeny-tiny bit of Canadian. Then I toss in Blizzard dwarfisms and a healthy dose of curmudgeonly profanity. So something like “well, there’s nothing to be done about it so you might as well come on” would come out as “well, nothin’ t’be done ’bout it, s’git yer ****in’ arse movin’, boy, afore I blow it off!”

By: Corise

Corise — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:27:53 +0000

Another minor point, regarding consistancy — I think that once you get to a point where you are comfortable with a character’s accent and have it down pretty well, it can be fun to start changing it up in certain situations. Just as people from the same region can have different versions of the same accent, the same person can sound very different from one situation to the next. Perhaps you have a character whose accent is generally fairly mild, but she slips into a stronger accent during times of high emotion, or when talking to old friends. Or maybe a character generally has a very slang-y, casual manner of speaking, but he uses a more formal diction when he really wants to emphasize a point.
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Also, I know quite a few people who make a very strong distinction between the way their characters talk in Common/Orcish and the way they talk in their native languages. Sometimes the rhythm and flow of the speech is similar, but the diction and pronunciation is markedly more “standard.” I’ve really only tried this with one of my characters (a rarely-played draenei shaman who is barely conversant in Common but quite eloquent in Draenei), but I’ve seen it used to very good effect, especially by dwarven and troll RPers.
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Oh, and the comments about characters’ accents being influenced by the people around them — I can speak to that one IC-ly and OOC-ly! IC-ly, Corise (who has always had a somewhat idiosyncratic speech pattern) has definitely picked up a lot of Dwarven-isms since she joined the Boomstick Gang four years ago. And OOC-ly, since I moved to Canada back in March, I have been told by friends and family back in the States that I am already beginning to pick up traces of my husband’s mild accent.

By: Anna

Anna — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:12:38 +0000

@Corise – I think that’s a good point, and one that I should’ve made. All the “background” that I do is just to get me started – it’s the in game stuff, the actual use and typing and practice and play that turns what is really just a mental convention about what something should sound like into “accented text”.

By: Aggrokitty

Aggrokitty — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:08:54 +0000

Interesting!

…now I have to roll up a troll.

As for me, Rashona deliberately has no accent – she’s very studious and worked hard to avoid an accent either in Orcish or Darnassian. On the rare occasions she uses Darnassian in RPs, it’s slower and the vocabulary’s considerably more limited, but the accent is minimal. My Draenei shaman, OTOH, has a long stint with the Dwarves as part of her backstory, and I wanted to give her a faint dwarvish accent, which for the most part just manifests as dwarvish phrasing rather than phonetics.