ACCENTS - Do your damn research

One thing you'll see consistently throughout this blog is my (pressing) insisting that people who create characters to Do Their Research. That'll be a separate post; today I wanted to poke at something that's been bugging me for the past few days.

TOO MANY PEOPLE USE/WRITE SHITTY ACCENTS.

I understand that attaching an accent to your character brings more life and depth to him, but for the love of God, spend a few minutes digging through YouTube or something to listen to what they sound like. There is nothing more grating than listening to someone butcher a Cockney accent, or type out a terrible bastardization of a German accent.

British accents abound, and in visual media, producing them appropriately can be a challenge to people who don't actually speak with one. To the American public, the accents from over the Pond are charming and "cute" (see the film "Love Actually" for the tongue-in-cheek example). We think of cool characters like John Constantine, or Brad Pitt's Pikey from "Snatch." Michael Caine, James Bond, Wee Hughie; the list abounds with real-life and fictional examples of British accents in all their colors and facets. And, like an uncouth Yank, I'm including all the areas of the Isles -- Scotland, Ireland and Wales. It's easier to type, although lumping them all together is a grievous sin and would get me a sound beating.

In role-play, the players in table-top and LARP games who abuse foreign accents and few and far between, so I can't really pick at them. But in written RP, they are proliferate and often loud eyesores. If you've spent any time in a forum, or online game, I can bet you dollars to donuts you've seen them. The apostrophe-happy, clipped consonant-wielding Anglophiles who lose whatever it is they're trying to convey in a string of broken sentences. They think they're hip. They're obviously busting out the South End and "keeping it real."

You want to hit them with a two by four. That's okay, I do too, don't worry about it.

I'm not saying everyone who types with an accent is committing sins against humanity; there are the people who Do Their Research, and take the time to understand what it is they're trying to sound like. They've listened to Catherine Zeta-Jones, or Daniel Craig, and they know where to clip their words. They are judicious with their apostrophes, and take into account the other person they're playing with may not have English as their primary spoken language.

But German accents, they seem to get dragged through the mud and abused like gingers left and right. German accents are cool, too -- look at Hans Landa. Nazi, psychopath, but he sounds awesome. And it's that awesome that suggests to people that, they too, could be cool with a German accent. What they don't pick up, however, is the appropriate way of utilizing that accent.

It's a particular pet peeve of mine because I took German for so many years (high school and college). I may not fluently speak the language, but I know enough to know when people are taking a cudgel to it. And GOOD SWEET JESUS, is that shit irritating!

For example -- I have run across two players in "City of Heroes" (you'll see that game bandied about a lot, too) who use German accents for their characters, and every time I see it, I want to scream at them. It's as if they've never, ever bothered to listen to a German native speaking English. They've never seen the newer "Inglorious Basterds," or even "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." They have taken what they assume is the legitimate accent, and trashed it all to fuck.

To wit, they use "du" in place of "you". NOT KNOWING THAT THE PRONOUN GOES THROUGH CHANGES DEPENDING ON TENSE. But no, no. Every fucking time, it's "du this", and "du that", never once a "dich" or "dir". Never mind the formal you, or the plurals, or anything.

Do you know how long it took to me to go to my favorite German language educational site (dict.leo.org), and look up the German versions of "you"? About FIVE SECONDS. There are EIGHT versions of "you".

Let's not delve into how they spell words they want to make sound like they're being pronounced by someone who's primary language is of the Germanic family. I don't have any examples on hand, and I would rather not trouble you all with the travesty.

You know one really easy way to give your character a German accent? Replace your V sounds with W. Words like "wall" become "vall," and "would" becomes "vould". There. German accent, and it sounds good, AND you're not offending anyone you're playing with. It's correct, not a bitch to carry out, and you still get the bennies for trying to give your character some interesting quirk.

Other offenders abuse Russian and French accents. They don't seem to realize that the Russian language, like several others, don't have the same "subject-verb-adjective" structure that English does. My favorite go-to for accurate Russian accents in the film "Eastern Promises", as it has several non-Russian actors executing appropriate accents. Hell, Viggo Mortensen reportedly went to the region in Siberia his character came from, just to listen to what the accent was like. Mickey Rourke spent time working on his accent for "Iron Man 2", and he sounded good, right?

For French, find anything with Jean Reno. Aside from being an excellent actor, he's generally speaking in French-accented English.

Take fifteen fucking minutes out of your day, hit up YouTube, and find the appropriate goddamn accents. Here, let me even make it that much fucking easier for people:

THE GERMAN ACCENT, as provided by Christoph Waltz

THE RUSSIAN ACCENT, as given by Vincent Cassel and Viggo Mortensen

THE FRENCH ACCENT, given by Kevin Kline