Dialects and Accents

Everybody knows when someone speaks English with a French or British or Australian accent. And everyone is familiar with the dialects known as the Southern Drawl and the Midwest Twang. Certainly nobody can miss the dialect spoken in Brooklyn New Yawk.

The very first post I ever wrote in this blog was about how, in 14 centuries, there was no way that English would survive in any understandable form. In fact, I postulated that the language would be based upon Portuguese, not English and it would be called Vuduri after the people who speak it.

But what of the Deucadons who originally spoke English just like us and have only been on Deucado for 500 years? What would their dialect sound like after 500 years of drift? I took my hint from William Shakespeare. He wrote Hamlet in 1599 which is a little over 400 years ago. Here is a brief snippet:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death.

Does that sound like regular English spoken on the street? No. It's barely understandable. And it was only written 400 years ago.

There are two elements at play here. First, there are new (or old) words and second there are modern words that are pronounced differently. The issue regarding a dialect is how thick to make it? I think it gets tiresome reading too much dialect. Especially if it makes what the characters are saying obscure. This was the problem presented to me when I introduced the Deucadons in the middle of Part 2 of Rome's Revolution.

So I decided to just give the Deucadons a minimal dialect. I call it a mix of Brooklyn and Britain. They don't pronounce the g's at the end of words. Like the phrase fooling around. They would pronounce it foolin' around. They also use the word ya instead of you. I tweaked a few other words and gave them a few words that we wouldn't recognize in modern English. But overall, I think what they say is understandable and just distinctive enough to make them seem different.

Tomorrow, I'll give you a simple example.