Accents: A How (not) To

 

There is poetry in an accent. Chistopher Waltz’ Austrian lilt, Lupita Nyong ’o’s intercontinental elocution, or even the late-great Dennis Farina’s Chicago brogue are all part of their performance and inform the characters they play. Truly, accents can be lyrical on the stage and on the screen. 

 

However, in print, accent marks and dialect-indicative spellings are a pain in the anatomy for the reader and can provoke editors to chainsaw killings. 

Anyone who’s read Twain, the Brontë sisters, and/or Dickens knows that the use of accents have a longstanding, if dubious history. All-too often though the accent is a distraction. In other instances the use of an accent is exploitive, if not fraudulent, e.g. all of Forrest Carter’s writings.

The young’uns call it country, the Yankees call it dumb, Tom Petty, Southern Accents

Is an accent “local color,” or offensive? Usually, the difference, (or the defense) is between intent and reception. When I submitted my Louisiana-Creole-accented hoodlum to my first crit-group, I was surprised by the response. My dialogue met with praise... from the six white writers. The sole writer of color as well as the crit-group leader, a recent immigrant from Ireland, remained coolly silent. I gutted all accent and dialect from my work that night.

The salient question is what does an accent mean now? Willie Nelson is from Abbott, (a farming community about 25 miles north of Waco) and he sounds like Texas. Jennifer Garner is from Houston, (4th largest city in the nation). She sounds like Texas, too. Neither sounds like Texas in television and the movies.

The UK comprises 12 regions, including Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, speaking, (mostly) one language and yet the diversity of accents is legendary. By contrast, Nigeria is nearly four-times the area and three-times the population with four lingual families and over 500 distinctive languages. A thesaurus can provide synonyms for accent and dialect but can’t tell you which Nigerian accent is in play.  Needless to say, when I read that he/she spoke with an “African accent,” I get punchy.

So how do you do it? 

Thomas Harris trusts the reader to decide what Louisianan, Will Graham and West Virginian, Clarice Starling sounds like. But Hannibal Lecter is the ultimate example of “tell” efficiently moving the story forward where “show” would only encumber the reader. Born in Lithuania, relocated to France in adolescence, and settling in Baltimore as a young adult, Doctor Lecter’s accent is mentioned but neither defined, nor “shown.”  

Legendary southerner, William Faulkner is sparse with his accents—like a word or three for every 1000 words. More recently, (but just as legendary) northerner, Robert B. Parker has a character that mimics Police Lieutenant Martin Quirk’s Boston burr and we read him that way forevermore. Neither author relies on Franken-spellings or grammar mutilations. Elegant prose beats pyrotechnics any day and less is always more.

The photo above, Historical, Dialects, and Borrowing, is from Google Sites and used for educational/illustrational purposes covered by the Fair Use Doctrine.