This video was sponsored by Campfire
More on that later (Impact followed by shattered glass) Howdy y'all
Welcome to the video There comes a moment in every character's development When the writer must ask themselves
"What does this character sound like?" Maybe you think this guy's gotta sound tough and coarse
like he really means business Or perhaps they must sound ancient and ethereal
by which I of course mean kind of British Or maybe you'll just do your best Scottish
even though your only exposure to the accent has been
Gimley and Scrooge McDuck Or maybe you'll just go for the
Nick Cage impression and call it a day A character's character really comes through in their voice In written media that's a narrative voice,
the tone they're written in But in media with an audio component it's a literal voice While you might think that audio media would have a
serious advantage in this category Prose can be really good at communicating a distinct narrative voice The written word is a very impressive thing But there's some trickiness there right of the bat See, language is very weird conceptually and it changes very quickly Try getting a laugh with "What are those?" these days So unless the story you're writing is taking place in the time and place that
matches up with the version of the language you're writing in There's liable to be some dissonance between the story and
the language it's written in Lots of 60s sci-fi is set in the future, sometimes even the past by now But it still has some hallmarks of the 60s baked into the language and
it still feels very much of it's time Obviously the ideal course of action to avoid this kind of dating would be to
write in a totally formal and neutral form of the language Which while theoretically free of watermarks of the era Also doesn't work because even the
formal textbook stuff changes over time How many of you are properly using thee and thou these days? There is no such thing as dialect free language Since slang has a tendency to creep in from social context,
language is buried in the social context it's used in And when a dialogue forms,
that social context is really baked in Every form of language has associations and
this is most obvious with accents Every dialect has at least one accent and
all language is subdivided into dialects There's no such thing as unaccented speech
just like there's no dialect free speech And because accents are rooted in dialects and
dialects are rooted in specific social contexts Accents carry some of that context with them Now the thing is, most people don't really think they speak with an accent Everyone sounds "Normal" to their own ears There's this false dichotomy between "has an accent" and
"doesn't have an accent" And writers fall into this very noticeably if they decide to write a
character with a specific accent For instance Bram Stoker loved giving his side characters nearly
incomprehensible transcribed accents While his main characters - with the exception of the
definitely American Quincey Morris Have no phonetic accent and are
generally using dictionary-accurate English But from the narrative voice it's still
pretty clear what accent it's supposed to be spoken in Some sentences like "Here am I, who shall be twenty in September,
and yet I never had a proposal till to-day, not a real proposal, and to-day I have had three.
Just fancy!" Just don't sound right in my neutral accent,
or any accent but posh British And then there's Quincey, who's lines don't sound right in any accent "Miss Lucy, I know I ain't good enough to regulate the fixin's of your little shoes,- -but I guess if you wait till you find a man that is you will go
join them seven young women with the lamps when you quit.- -Won't you just hitch up alongside of me and let us go down the long road together,
driving in double harness?" (Eugh) So writers usually write in their own "Neutral Language" Which is of course a uniquely personal dialect and accent that still
registers as normal to them due to familiarity And when they want to single out a character as outside that normal, well,
sometimes they give them an accent *they* find outside the normal Hoping to carry the associations they have with that accent Since language is steeped in implications this is one of the most efficient ways to get across some structural character traits In theory In practice, because language is *so* steeped in implications, This can be a bit like trying to paint on a little bit of smokey eye and
accidentally dropping the entire housewares section on someone Of course sometimes characters just get given accents because they're fun,
It's not always that deep And in cases when that's true, it's just as casual as any other character trait We made this character have this accent because they're from this
place or because it's fun and that's as far as that goes But while sometimes an accent is just an accent,
sometimes it's meant to signal more than that And that's where things start getting complicated But before we dive into accents and how they're used in fiction,
specifically accents of English We have to address why this story is written in English at all Many stories take place in settings that aren't specifically the
English-speaking regions of modern-day Earth In fact, they may have very little to do with Earth at all And English is a serious hot mess of a
language with it's linguistic development rooted in a lot of
goofy and highly specific historical shenanigans How do we justify it's presence in a story or
world that doesn't line up with the version of the language we're using? Now the realistic, or "Doylist" explanation is that: The story is written in modern English because it's being written by a
writer that's fluent in it and intended for an audience who is also fluent in it And as narratively accurate as it might be to
write the whole thing in your own personal conlang The goal of a story is to be read,
so you probably want to make it readable Finnegans Wake is purposefully written in not-contemporary English and
it's notorious for being nigh-incomprehensible But like all Doylist explanations,
this require's a little suspension of disbelief And since we're asking the question, we're clearly not suspending out disbelief Specifically we are harpooning our disbelief out of the sky for the
purposes of narrative analysis So let's look at the in-universe, or Watsonian explanation Now this explanation can vary a lot, sometimes it's just not addressed,
which is fine most of the time Like I said, suspension of disbelief Totally fine to hand-wave the language you're writing in because what else
can you be reasonably expected to do? Then some stories write in stuff like universal translators,
especially popular in sci-fi narratives Though there's still no explanation as to why the version of English the
translators default to is the same one that was popular when the story was made And then as always there's Tolkien setting the high bar of insanity with the
ultimate explanation for why his high fantasy epics are written in English Specifically that he translated them into English In the meta-narrative around The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Tolkien claims he's drawing on a primary source called
"The Red Book of Westmarch" Specifically, several annotated and edited copies of the original manuscript
which was written by Bilbo but lost to history He's basically deriving this from the Norse Eddas where the
originals are also not available This original story would have been written in one of the many
conlangs Tolkien created for this world And The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings were just
translations and compilations from this original source text The names aren't even the same like Merry, full name Meriadoc,
who was supposedly originally named "Chilimanzar" Which was shortened to Chillic, which meant "happy or merry" So in the process of translating, quote-unquote,
Tolkien renamed him Meriadoc, which could be shortened directly to Merry This is the high-bar explanation for why the story is in English when the
original has no reason to be And it's also a convenient Segway into an extremely relevant topic: Localization,
Localization is a term that'll be painfully familiar to anime fans It describes the process by which a story is translated, rewritten,
and adapted to appeal to a specific regional audience It essentially attempts to recontextualize the story so this new audience can
appreciate it in the same way it's original audience would have appreciated it Mapping unfamiliar contexts from the original into a more familiar parallel Attempting to reproduce the original vibe which was lost when the
story was removed from its source context Kinda like those early 2000s reimaginings of Shakespeare plays into modern settings Tolkien renames his characters Merry and Pippin because to his
audience of mid 1900s England those names would have
sounded cheerful and homey to match the characters Where the original names of Chillic and Razal would sound weird and alien Of course since he was making up the original story and localizing kinda backwards This is a dubious example Unlike the case of Lysistrata,
A comedic play written by Aristophanes in the 400s BC Wherein the women of Athens and Sparta worked together to end the
Peloponnesian War by refusing to bone the men until they cut it out I read a translation of it in high school and
noticed something very weird about the Spartan character Lampito... She was written with a very noticeable Scottish accent Recognizing this play had been written in ancient Greek,
I asked the teacher where the heck that accent had come from And she told me that the author of our translation was British. The logic had basically been that to the Athenian audience the Spartans were crude,
violent brawlers, so Sparta was to Athens as Scotland was to England Basically it's a big ol' stereotype full of ethnic humor, isn't that fun? It's not just England by the way, since the English perception of Scotland isn't the same as, say,
the American perception of Scotland, Or the Scottish perception of Scotland Other translations localize with different accents to carry the same implications For instance, American translations of Lysistrata often suggest an
Appalachian accent for Lampito So the translator for Lysistrata localized the play to an
English audience by telling them these Spartans were "basically Scots" And they weren't the only ones,
thanks to Jerard Butler's dulcet tones the Spartans in 300 also sound Scottish Except for the queen, she gets to sound English In fact, English seems to be the official accent of all of human history,
since everyone from Roman emperors to French revolutionaries will be inexplicably,
Extremely British Les Mis has this bad, we show that the students at the
barricade are classy because of their mild BBC English accents And then we show that Gavroche is a
low-class guttersnipe by giving him a Cockney accent In France, lest we forget The use of accents in fiction is often a tool to localize a narrative by
leveraging local stereotypes to map to less familiar stereotypes We might not be able to recognise a low-class French accent,
so when we translate it into English we use Cockney as the code instead Though of course we Americans only recognise Cockney as the
stereotypical low-class accent because it gets used that way so much It's pretty circular And accents don't always have to be linked with Ethnic stereotypes Consider talking like a pirate when you've gotta get across that you're pirates,
For instance That accent has the distinction of being almost completely made up, too Which I guess just proves that you don't need to leverage existing
stereotypes when building your fictional demographics Anyway, Classical literature aside, localization was also a
serious concern in the earlier days of anime dubbing This might sound weird in the post-simuldub world we live in where
anime has infiltrated every level of our society But back in the day, the idea that Americans might enjoy
Japanese television was extremely controversial At minimum it was kind of untested So when dubbing companies started trying to dub anime for a mainstream
American audience, sometimes they made some pretty significant changes to make it more
"palatable" The dubbing company 4Kids was kinda notorious for this When they dubbed Pokemon, for instance,
they would systematically scrape out any and all references to Japanese culture,
including the food Rice balls would be crudely photoshopped out and replaced by things like
crackers or sub sandwiches They would also rename characters which was more
notable in how they dubbed Yugioh Japanese names like Jonouchi Katsuya, Anzu, and Honda,
Became Joey Wheeler, Téa, and Tristan And this is also where they really went ham on the accents Those of you that watched the dub or are otherwise familiar with Yugioh the abridged series,
will know that Joey has an extremely noticeable Brooklyn accent And Bakura has a British accent,
Neither of these make all that much sense in context Everyone seems to have grown up in roughly the same neighbourhood,
but the accents are there anyway This is because in the original Japanese,
both characters had fairly distinct styles of speech Styles that don't translate into English very easily Japanese has some very specific modes of formality in speech,
ranging from a very informal mode, used when talking to close friends and family Up to a very formal mode that can sound almost archaic in daily use Joey, or Jonouchi, notably uses the absolute
least formal speech no matter who he's talking to Because he's a pretty brash, rude guy,
without an ounce of respect for authority It doesn't really matter to him if he's talking to his best friend or a bazillionaire CEO,
he'll be casual just the same And in contrast Bakura speaks extremely formally,
most of his lines could come from a textbook No slang, informality or abbreviation anywhere This doesn't apply to his evil alter-ego by the way, kid's just polite So when localizing, the translators gave Joey a thick Brooklyn accent,
and Bakura, a British accent To clue the audience in that Joey was loud and rude, and Bakura was formal and polite And while it wasn't strictly an accent, when translating for Yugi and Yami, they had to deal with the fact that Yugi describes himself with the personal pronoun "boku",
which just means "I" but has implications of youth or immaturity While Yami uses "ore", which also just means I,
but has implications of masculinity, maturity, and superiority So while the original Japanese version just had Yami kind of
sounding a little more confident than Yugi, the dub also made Yami sound considerably older, with a much deeper voice What's interesting is that their localization efforts actually kinda
flattened one of the characters The villain Pegasus was an American in the original Japanese version,
and he talked really really weirdly He would use English words in place of Japanese words almost at random,
and he handled honorifics really bizarrely Japanese appends honorifics to names,
you don't just call someone by their name, you append something like "kun", or "san", or "sama", or "Chan" They mean stuff like "Mr.", or "Ms.", or "Lord", or imply diminutives like "Kid" Pegasus would append "Boy", like, the English word boy, in place of "Kun", which kind of means boy, but you would never use them interchangeably And he still does this in the English dub, calling people like "Kaiba-boy" and stuff But while it's still pretty weird,
it loses the context of how staggeringly bizarre he sounded in the original Japanese He was like the inverse of that person who sprinkles random Japanese into their English Because they've gotten way into anime and think that's sufficient to learn a language To properly localize it he probably should have been saying stuff like: "KONICHIWA EVERYBODY, I'd like to welcome you to my simply sugoi tournament" So specifically giving a character an accent is usually
meant to code to the audience- -that this character is intended to carry associations of that accent Where not giving the character an explicit accent leaves it implied to be "neutral", Though as we've discussed, there still is an accent present,
just one considered neutral by the author Bram Stoker's non-Quincey-non-Van-Hellsing main characters still sound strange when read
in a non-English accent Because the accent is connected with the
dialect and the dialect the book uses is fairly standard high-brow English But because those characters speak in a
similar dialect to the one used in the narration It comes across as a neutral accent We're not supposed to infer anything about those
characters from their speech patterns Unless they're like the goofy foreign Dr. Van Hellsing
or the bold American cowboy Quincey Morris Now, like all coding, this is very tricky to do,
and it's easy to accidentally communicate associations you don't mean And it can also be hard to distinguish traits of the
character from traits of the stereotype you're coding them with Tolkien's elves might have talked kind of posh
British in the movies but derivative elves often also act posh British where the
originals were just very ancient and alien And how many traits of modern fantasy dwarves borrow from
Tolkien's complex originals instead of dipping into the well of Scottish stereotypes
that got attached by the movie? When you're coding a character, you have less control than you
might want over how the audience reads the character The other difficulty, of course, is that because language changes surprisingly quickly,
the coding can also change out from under you Stoker's use of transcribed phonetic accents probably carried a lot of
associations at the time, but nowadays they're nearly incomprehensible It's hard enough to even understand what the characters are even saying,
let alone what stereotypes we're supposed to be assigning them The problem with localizing or coding for an audience is it
only works for that specific audience And as time and society marches on, the coding loses some of the
context that made it work in the first place (Sigh) Let's see,
Sometimes an accent is just an accent, but sometimes it's a lot more than that And sometimes that can be a problem Language is weird, writing is hard,
accents are deceptively hard, and if you think you're good at one you're probably wrong So..... yeah And thanks again to campfire for sponsoring this video Campfire pro is a writing software designed to help
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for if you wanna go full Tolkien and really lean ino your dialects and accents Conveniently, Camprire pro has a 10 day free trial
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