Good online source for accents/dialects?

Hello all,

I figure this was as good as place as any to ask this question.

Sometimes I like to RP somebody with an accent or dialogue (Irish, Southern, French, etc.) but I always find myself wondering how good of a job I'm doing!

I am asking for anybody out there who RPs dialects, do you know of any good online source with examples?

(There are just so many times my Irish hero can say, "****" and hope that I'm conveying that he's Irish. )

Or do you simply listen/watch a lot of movies that have that regional dialect and it just "comes to you" as you RP?

Thanks for any and all tips!

I confess, the notion of scouring the net for dialect resources never occurred to me, even while I was working on them in class (Linguist here). On the whole, I am vaguelly opposed to dialects in RP since the inability to actually render them correctly bugs me.

Howeve, here are a few suggestions for you:

Firstly, if you turn to Rabbi Google and use as your input the specific dialect you are looking for plus the word "dialect" or "Resourse or a combination of the above, you are bound to get significant results. I know there is a Scots Language page. http://www.scotslanguage.com/ And there are bound to be similar resources for Irish, Aussie and a large part of the American local dialects. I saw a handy site or Italian dialects around, as well.

Secondly, there are some general linguistics resources I can suggest which provide a certain amount of phonetic information about a language (if you know how to read these, it's fairly equivalent to putting one's hands on an accent resource) Just reading off of my list of favourites, I can suggest linguistlist.com and the tower of babel at http://starling.rinet.ru/ as well as Ethnologue (which was an invaluable resource for me during my studies) at http://www.ethnologue.com/.

The marked advantage of these sites as compared to layman's knowledge, is that they often also provide syntactic and semantic variations, not merely phonetic ones. Of course, being professional resources, they are much harderto navigate in order to find the specific information you are looking for, as well as significantly more cumbersome to read.

Just in a quick look-see online, I found a collection of American dialects hosted by the Library of Congress here: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/linguistics/

Some British dialects: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/dialects/

A collection of links: http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/links.htm

Wow, I've never even thought of the possibility of an online source for dialects. T'would be all sorts of nifty to have an international one.

That's the main thing that's held me back from playing a Japanese character, doing the speech pattern justice, but I finally broke down and decided to give it a try recently. My main method is having "Speaks with a Japanese accent" in the typing bubble and to toss in words picked up from online translators. The character is also somewhat formal, so English slang and contractions are out too.

I have a character from Peru who speaks in broken English with what little I know of Spanish thrown in, which is all fun until I come across someone who knows more Spanish than me. >.<

My main is supposed to be Egyptian, with Arabic as his native language. A usually calm character, he also speaks very formally, as he only ever bothered to learn basic English, but the more agitated he gets, the worse his English gets. His "accent" has sort of mutated into Ebou Dari more than anything with some verbal tics and Arabic mutterings thrown in.

I've come across people who can pull off native Russian and German characters ridiculously well, and then there are those that go so over the top it borders on parody.

good luck D.B.B.

Thank you again!

Rodion, I like your suggestions and I may take them.

I just wouldn't know what a typical Irishman may say, for example.

So even a source of idioms, slang, dialect, would be appreciated.

Morv is always my go-to person for language questions. You could try PMing her, she has a few specialties. Or you could just make it up, like I always do.

I really didn't mean to start up some huge debate by asking this question.

I appreciate the links and other information people have shared. Thanks very much!

If you've run into anyone you think does the accent you want well, pay attention to how they do it. That and the links so far are probably your best bet. That list of slang links is nice.

It's not so useful for typing an accent, but I'm fond of IDEA. It has several examples of most accents, so you can get an idea of how different people from the area might speak differently, and how the accent of someone originally from area x but living in place y might have changed. The Speech Accent Archive is also nice and has phonetic transcriptions of more of its samples.

for evil villans i use dr no as my reference

for good heroes i use the soviets from old gi joe cartoon or the soviets from xmen cartoon ( fox one)

That's why Than speaks "a patois of English." It's English, just a mish-mash of about 1000 years of it.

I often find, the less-realistic your character is, the more entertaining it can be. This is comics after all, so the more exaggerated and supremely over-the-top your character can be, the more it matches the genre.

This is not always the case of course, but in general, since we're in the world of ZAP, BAM, ZOWIE, (where physics is ignored and the scale of our powers are constantly contorted and out of hand), that to blend into your environment your personality can be (if you choose) to be equally distorted.

If you look at comics greatest creations, they left "realism" behind a long time ago. In fact, if you study Superman, he became progressively more "unreal" with each passing year - and yet it was this progression that made him surge in popularity.

So if the research is part of your enjoyment, then go for it. This is, after all just a lark. However, I don't think it will necessarily make your character "better" (whatever that means). Characters in stories, especially "fantastic" stories that comics regularly exploit, are often just as distorted as their environments.

This can include, not only irregular, hackneyed accents - but also creating entirely your own dialect/accent, simply because it is entertaining to do so.

So I want to offer the idea, that it can be fun to research - fun to learn about somewhere new to adapt into a character. However, in the end, the style doesn't necessarily have to be refined to work.

I don't think there's such a thing as "good" RP or "bad" RP. It's really just a question of personal preference. I tend to gravitate to those who are unashamed to do their own thing - without apology. Even if the story seems trite, or derivative, if it is honest in its intent - and if it is offered to you as an equal, I'll happily go along. This is why I always say kids are really "good" at RP, because it is often so free, so honest - and not "hung up" on how to do it right. It comes naturally to them, and for me (and this is my own view, nothing more), this makes it much more entertaining.

So, by all means research accents, but at some point let yourself fly-off-the-cuff if it suits you. This is a world where the laws of physics are utterly ignored, so the laws of linguistics are just as much free game.

I also completely forgot about another method I've seen used. Working under the premise that group commlinks are sophisticated enough to be able to translate most languages on the spot, for a character that constantly spoke in Japanese, the player simply prefaced everything they said (similar to [OOC] style binds) with a variation of "Translated" or "TFJ".

And elaborating on the characters I mentioned, the Peruvian was psychotically insane and somewhat simple minded. He switched back and forth at random between Spanish and English, and did not know complex English words.

For my main, on the other hand, I play it that he is willfully ignorant of learning any more than basic, formal English. He has no desire to do so. Sort of like how, well at least in my day, High School foreign language classes only taught the basics and acknowledged that there were multitudes of dialects that did things differently. Anyone who uses heavy slang or pop cultures references might as well be speaking another language altogether to my main.

good luck D.B.B.

One of my characters is Irish-American (South Boston type); he was created to be the brother of another player's character, so if it was up to me I might go lighter on the accent... or not. As it is, I try to match her dialect. In the end, I justify it by noting that both comic books and television tend to go for stereotypes over subtlety.

So Jamie, well, he talks like this. Mostly what ye'd expect, good proper English, but with a certain rhythm to the words an' some letters left out.

(I also tend to mostly play him in just our little circle, so everyone already knows what accent I'm trying to represent.)

Typing in an accent can easily be over done. Don't try to dialect-ize every word. That said, this is a great reference just to listen.

http://web.ku.edu/~idea/dialectmap.htm