What do you think of accents?

[Cortland]

In the comics I've read, dialect is only an issue if I actually have to stop reading and start translating. Adding a "y'all" or replacing the G with an apostrophe for words ending in "ing" usually don't have that effect.

[Terotrous]

Personally, I think they can be okay if used sparingly. You certainly don't want to make the character's dialogue hard to read. But adding just a tiny bit of an accent to someone's text can often allow you to tell readers a lot about them without having to do so directly. Consider "Howdy y'all, what can I do ya for?" vs "Hi there, what can I do for you?". In the first case, you probably already have a general impression of the speaker whereas the second gives you nothing. Sometimes this kind of "economy of description" can be a useful storytelling tool.


But remember, with accents, a little goes a long way. People get the idea really fast. You don't need to hammer it home every time they open their mouth.


Of course, comedy frequently involves breaking the rules. Having a character whom no one can understand can be funny if the joke is that no one else can understand them either.

[Kisai]

At the risk of bumping this (it's like almost 3 weeks old) and adding nothing new.

There is a two-fold problem with accents:
a) Translation
b) Metaphors

Someone who speaks English naively may understand the accent by phonetic cues (y'all know what I mean), but someone who isn't native English won't get it. An example would be watching the movie "Brave" with only subtitles and the sound muted. For one there won't be the context of "this is how these people speak" and without that context, it just looks like the writer is trying to be quirky (see Homestuck.) Trying to translate pretty much anything from English to another language, phonetically is a nightmare.

When it comes to metaphor use, in English we use a lot of phrases that only have context in English. So when you try to bring something thru an accent, it may have the problem of breaking the joke. We often slam localization of Japanese and Korean into English for losing the context of jokes, or translations being lazy and trying to use some Americanism instead.

But not many languages (to my knowledge) have ways of writing accented language anyway. When you use accented characters in English, native English readers just don't know how those are supposed to sound, so they are flattened (think of the accents used in French and Spanish.) The only accent that can really be achieved is "sounding like an idiot" to the reader. This is accomplished with word breaks or dropping connecting words.

[IVstudios]

Someone who speaks English naively may understand the accent by phonetic cues (y'all know what I mean), but someone who isn't native English won't get it. An example would be watching the movie "Brave" with only subtitles and the sound muted. For one there won't be the context of "this is how these people speak" and without that context, it just looks like the writer is trying to be quirky (see Homestuck.) Trying to translate pretty much anything from English to another language, phonetically is a nightmare.

Well, that comes down more to knowing your audience than anything else. Most people write for people who speak the same language as them, and would therefor understand the same linguistic cues and idiosyncrasies. It's the same as if you're writing for a specific demographic, you can use terms and references that general audiences won't get. If you're writing for science geeks you could make a whole bunch of physics and biology jokes that most people won't understand.

I mean, if your going to worry about how everything is going to translate into other cultures and languages, you wouldn't be able to use anything that has a cultural context. You couldn't use any but the broadest jokes, make reference to any non-international brand names or use any slang. What'd be the point?