How to Write Stories People Will Love

Question 71: Accents

RavensOfOld asks: So, I have this character who's lived in two very different states with different accents. So, I was wondering how you can write accents for characters and how would you describe them? I've definitely done research on the accents of where this character was raised, but I'd still like your expert advice on how to write characters who have lived in several places with very different accents. And maybe how that would affect their own accent and style of speaking if they lived in different areas for many years.

I've seen accents handled in different ways. I can't offer "expert advice" for this since there's not a right or wrong way to do it, but I can at least offer viewpoints on what I've seen in traditionally published books.

Spell It How It Sounds

This is when the dialogue of an accented character is spelled so so it sounds like the accented words. For example, "thar" instead of there, or "joo" instead of you. This is fine for key words in a sentence that exemplify the accent. Trying to make all the words in a sentence sound accented becomes cumbersome to read, though. Try not to do that.

Telling Instead of Showing

You keep hearing "show don't tell", right? Well telling can be a useful tool sometimes. Rather than trying to demonstrate what an accent looks like in dialogue, we can simply state that there's an accent. A couple of examples:

- She began yelling and pointing a finger at me. The angrier she got, the thicker her accent became. By the end of her tirade, I could barely understand her Cajun-tinted words.

- He spoke with an English accent, which made me swoon.

Mixing It Up

You can also alternate between the two methods above to keep it fresh. Sometimes you tell the reader that Aunt Doris spoke with a New England accent, and other times she just announces she's going to go "pahk the cah."

RavensOfOld, to answer your question about living in different places with different accents, it might be better to use the "telling" method. For example:

She still spoke with a predominantly English accent, but occasionally a "y'all" would appear in her speech from living in Texas so long.

Keep in mind that people don't always change their accents just because they live someplace different. Children are more likely to, since they are still learning and adapting. But adults change less. The older they are, the less likely they are to change. Another factor is who they live with. I have a friend who came to the US when she was little, but still has an accent as an adult because of her Spanish-speaking household. I'm constantly surprised by how thick some people's accents are even though they've been living someplace different for decades.