#accents

As someone who grew up bilingual and has spent years watching fiction handle this with the grace of a person trying to parallel park a cruise ship: please. i am asking nicely. stop phonetically spelling out accents in dialogue. stop having your multilingual character "think in english." and stop treating languages as cute flavour when they're actually load-bearing walls. let me explain:

⊹ Phonetic accent spelling-- "ze said zis," "I canna doo eet," "ees very 'ot"--does not convey an accent. it conveys that you find the accent hard to read and mildly comedic. actual accents are not misspellings. they are specific music, rhythm, stress patterns, vowel shapes that cannot be represented in text that way. what conveys accent is word order, idiom, the things a speaker reaches for. A character who says "it doesn't matter, leave it" and a character who says "never mind, let it go" are from different places. use that. not the apostrophes.

⊹ Multilingual people do not experience their languages as separate filing cabinets they access one at a time. languages blur and overlap and interfere with each other in beautiful ways. When you're tired you reach for the word from the other language because it's closer. when you're emotional you revert to your first language because it's where your feelings actually live. when you're angry you swear in the language you learned swearing in. when you're tender you use the diminutives and endearments that don't translate. your bilingual character's language choice in every scene is characterisation. use it as such.

⊹ the thing about not having a word for something is real and it matters. Every language has concepts the others can't carry cleanly. the grief for something you never had. the specific quality of afternoon light. the feeling of wanting to be home while you're already there. when your character encounters something their language doesn't have a word for, they don't just find a workaround, they feel the gap. they feel slightly untranslatable. multilingual people live with the knowledge that some part of who they are exists only in one language and cannot be fully brought across.

Johnny had a strong accent, that wasn’t news. But a pattern you had begun noticing was that if he got irritated enough…it came out hard. And yeah, sue you! You like his accent. So, what, if you sometimes, maybe, intentionally piss him off to bring it out? Is that really harming anyone?

So here you were, talking trash about his favorite sports team. You honestly couldn’t care less about the one you were ‘favoring,’ you just knew it’s the one that would piss him off the most.

You can see him trying to hear you out, be a good boyfriend and support your opinions, but the more wrong things you say, the redder his face gets, until finally he explodes in a mess of Scottish accent and sports rage.

“Steeeamminggg Jesus, hen! Ya cannae say that! To think—“

Now he’s on a roll, passionately speaking, on the verge of yelling. Honestly it’s almost unintelligible with how much scots is being thrown in, but you do not care. It sounds like music to your ears. You can’t help it that your gaze turns a little sultry, and you end up biting your lip, head tilting as you zone out. His voice is just so smooth, and his forearm muscles are being accentuated by his frantic movements, and his eyes are so blue…

“Are ye listening? Cannae believe ya! Gettin’ me goin’ on an’ on ‘bout this and ye ain’t even listenin’!” His anger dwindles when he notices what you are paying attention to. He knows that look. Intimately. Suddenly he doesn’t remember what he was on about. He just sees your face and knows it’s time to take this conversation out of the rec room.