This image combines
Windmill by FreeImages.com/Dave Evans and
Guidebooks by Freeimages.com/dog matic.
Thanks to both!

How do you work accents into your speech patterns for voicing NPCs? I have three techniques that I use repeatedly, and two general principles that I rely on continuously. Today’s article is going to look at these five secret weapons in my characterization arsenal (some of which I have described before, I must admit, though I’m digging a little deeper into them this time around).

A caveat:

the techniques offered in this article work to deliver foreign accents in English. I don’t know if they will work for foreign accents in any other language – nor do I know they won’t. I have often wondered, in fact, at what French spoken in an Irish accent, or a Russian Accent, or in fact any other combination of language and accents, sounds to those who speak the foreign language. So it might work, but I can make no guarantees. Let me know!!

Technique 1: The locking phrase

To start with, I know I’ve repeated this tip many times. It actually derives from Babylon-5, and is the technique that Peter Jurrasic used to get into character as Londo Mollari. He discovered a “locking phrase”, a series of words that he could not possibly forget which automatically – when delivered in Londo’s faux-Hungarian accent – “locked” his voice ‘in character’ for any text that the script required him to deliver. His phrase was “Good Morning, Mis-ter Garaboldi”.

The trick is working out – and documenting for later use – the best possible locking phrase. Jurassic discovered his because this was something that early scripts had him say on several occasions – sheer coincidence and fate played their part in the outcome, in other words. You probably won’t be so lucky.

There are five requirements that a potential locking phrase needs to meet in order to succeed in performing this function. It needs to:

• …make the accent accessible – there’s no use having a locking phrase that doesn’t deliver the accent!
• …work quickly and silently – unlike a television set, where you can say or do whatever you need to before the cameras start rolling in order to get into character, you can’t go around repeating your locking phrase out loud. And it has to be very short, or it will disrupt the rhythm of play.
• …be reliable and persistent – you don’t get to re-shoot a scene where it doesn’t work, so your locking phrase needs to work almost every time – and it has to reinforce the accent you are impersonating strongly enough that you can drop it (for narrative and game admin delivery) and pick it back up (for dialogue), both at a moment’s notice.
• …be appropriate to the character – the identification between the NPC that you are playing and the way that character speaks needs to be definitive; the result states by definition that the NPC always speaks that way.
• …make the accent obvious without being a caricature – perhaps the hardest requirement of all, and achieved by applying some of the other techniques and principles I’ll be discussing in this article.

That’s a pretty tall order, but it can still be done. The secret is to:

1. Pick a phrase that the character is going to say early in most conversations; it might be a greeting, or “let’s get down to business”, or any of a hundred other lines that can become a vocal habit of the NPC.
2. Pick a phrase that captures the key elements of the accent.
3. Customize that phrase in some manner that is distinctive to the NPC.
4. Use the phrase as a tag to indicate that the NPC associated with it is doing the talking.

Two Standards

I use two standards for accents: the stock character and the key NPC. Most of the instructions above refer to the more demanding of those standards. For stock characters, the bar is set much lower.

It’s often helpful to “channel” some actor or on-screen character who has the same accent. You want Austrian? “I’ll Be Back” (impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger) works for most people, but isn’t something you can place early in most conversations. But choosing some other famous line by Arnie that is more appropriate to such placement gets you there. And if none come to mind, use it silently – it’s brief enough.

“Faith and Beggorrah” works for me for Irish accents. Sometimes “Saints and Beggorah” as a variation.

For German, I use “Gut Mornink, Herr Kapitan” – which is probably appalling sentence construction, but it gets my mind and tongue moving in the right ways.

For Russian, “Can you direct me to the nuclear wessels?” (or just “nuclear wessels”) does the trick.

For Scottish, “Och Aye, the noon; Captain, my wee bairns canna take any more”.

For British, I use Sir Humphrey Appelby (spelling? never mind) at his smarmiest, “Dear Lady”, “Prime Minister” (condescending, disapproving), etc.

For Spanish, I channel Speedy Gonzales: “Senõr Duck, I presume? Welcome to me-hi-co” …. You get the idea.

Technique 2: The foreign excursion

The occasional word in a native tongue, especially when the players will still understand the statement, works wonders. Favorite words for the purpose are “yes”, “no”, “hello”, “goodbye”, and “excuse me”/”pardon me”.

“Si”, “Hola” and “Scuza”- Spanish.
“Da” and “Nyet” – Russian.
“Oui”, “Non” and “Pardohn?” (and “Madamoiselle” which is not on the standard list) – French.
“Si” and “Ciao” – Italian.

And always get a translation of “I do not speak English” and “My English is not so good” or “… is so-so” and write it down phonetically!

Technique 3: The Rhyming Dictionary

An accent is basically a consistently-different way of pronouncing certain syllables. Pick the one that you find the most iconically representative of the accent that you are trying to convey – that’s fairly easy, because these are the sounds that are exaggerated in caricatures of the population in question – and then find one or two words that contain that syllable. Then look these words up in a rhyming dictionary.

Rhyming dictionaries are designed for use by poets and lyric writers, but they work wonderfully in identifying words that contain the “accented sound” that you have chosen – then all you have to do is find ways of working those words into your dialogue. Don’t force them in, use them only when it seems natural in preference to some synonym, and you will deliver your accent in a way that seems natural and unforced – because it is.

Here are a few for you to consider:

• New Oxford Rhyming Dictionary – Most expensive of them all, but also seemingly the most up-to-date and Oxford’s reputation secures it pride of place on the list
• Merriam-Webster’s Rhyming Dictionary – Reputation is there but this appears to be an older edition by almost 8 years. At least it’s relatively cheap – but you’re mostly relying on second-hand copies for anything but the Oxford, and that’s why I’ve listed so many
• Essential Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary – Looks good but I haven’t used it. The first rhyming dictionary I ever saw had the same name, and was excellent – but I’m not sure it was the same book, that was many many years ago, so I can’t give it bonus marks for that.
• The New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary – Most of my readers are from the USA (Canada, the UK, and Australia are next best, with the order changing somewhat from time to time), so this might be more useful to them than I would consider it. But it’s affordable – while copies last.
• Scholastic Rhyming Dictionary – I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this one; it might be excellent, or it might focus on the correct pronunciation of words rather than the everyday usage of those words. But it seemed quite affordable, though copies are limited.
• The Complete Rhyming Dictionary by Clement Wood and Ronald J. Bogus – The first book that Amazon offered me in response to my search and also the one that I am least confident in recommending because of the second part of the title: “Including The Poet’s Craft Book”. Now, if you want to use poetry in your games and need a hand writing it, this might be the perfect weapon; I don’t, so it makes the list – in last place.

There were more, but these should be enough to get one for everyone whose inspired by this tip enough to buy one – for at least the reasonably-foreseeable future.

General Principle 1: A little applied consistently is better than a lot applied inconsistently

Having dispensed my three killer techniques (three-and-a-half if you want to get technical), it’s time to move on to the two general principles that I always try to follow, and which have been rammed home to me repeatedly.

At one point I developed the theory that it was better to establish the accent or foreign language all at once and that the memory of that would then persist, refreshed with the occasional reminder. As a theory, it sounds good – but in practice it simply didn’t work. The opening salvo was so densely-populated with accented words and foreign language that it was incomprehensible to the players, especially in a noisy environment.

I was also busy in that opening salvo with establishing the personality of the character doing the talking – and there wasn’t enough room to do both, and as a result, both purposes failed, as did the primary purpose of the dialogue, to communicate. Three strikes, and the theory was out.

A light, but more consistent, sprinkling quickly proved more effective. I try to make sure that there’s at least one reminder of the accent in every substantial paragraph of dialogue. And I try to put one in for every three or four lines of canned dialogue, or every 45-seconds-to-a-minute or so of improvised dialogue.

What’s more, I discovered that I gained greater control over nuance by adopting this theory; by increasing the frequency just a little (to one every 30 seconds, say) I could distinguish between characters with heavily-accented English and characters with excellent English who were not native English-speakers, all without compromising comprehension on the part of the players. This turned the accent from a detriment in characterization to an asset that aided it. General principles don’t get much better – or more useful – than that!

General Principle 2: A little applied consistently is better than a lot applied consistently

It’s still necessary to watch out for overload. A particular problem arises when you are playing an NPC who speaks no English with someone – could be a PC, could be an NPC – translating (or even occasionally, mistranslating). Once again, you need to provide an opening salvo in the foreign language, which needs to be prepped in advance, and in which you also need to establish the initial perception of the personality of the speaker; then you need to shift gears and deliver the comprehensible translation without losing the identification as a foreign-language speaker.

Because you no longer require that opening paragraph to be comprehensible to the players, this becomes a manageable process. There’s enough room in any given piece of dialogue for it to do two jobs, but not three, which means that for every piece of dialogue you need to choose which combination of two you want to achieve:

• Delivery of information & comprehension of that information;
• Delivery of accent/foreign language;
• Delivery of characterization.

By ruling that the first paragraph of dialogue did nothing but focus on jobs two and three and ignored job one, and then shifting to a different focus in which job one is primary and jobs 2 and 3 alternate in some ratio as room within the dialogue permits, the situation becomes manageable.

What I have found is that you can employ the “little, consistently” as an accent (even if the translator speaks both languages like a native), you can manage to perform all three jobs at the same time, with that opening salvo as a platform.

This seems to contradict the findings reported in describing the first principle, but there is a subtle difference in the circumstances, and thinking about that difference led me to formulate the principle now under discussion.

You can think of any dialogue as possessing information content and having a limited “overhead capacity” to convey other information. Processing an accent is one of the things that can occupy that overhead capacity – but if you oversaturate the dialogue with an accent, you suck all the air out of that capacity, air that you need for other purposes – characterization, emotion, etc.

What’s more, one of the surest routes to caricature is to overemphasize the accent. That might be fine for a cartoon Pepe Le Pew, but it’s no good for any serious characters in a believable RPG.

The process

I write the first couple of lines of whatever dialogue the character is to deliver in English. I then copy and paste into Google translate, and then attempt to sound out the translated lines in an appropriate accent. After doing that a couple of times, and editing to replace any words that don’t translate into something that will, I copy and paste the translated text back into my word processor and rewrite them as phonetically as possible. After that, I switch to delivering the dialogue in accented English.

For example:

• “Disaster at the old farmstead, come at once! The midnight cockerel has been slain by the a nightmare guardian!”

In French, this becomes:

• “Catastrophes à l’ancienne ferme, venez à la fois! Le cockerel de minuit a été tué par le tuteur d’un cauchemar!”

Replacing “Cockerel” with “bird” gives me:

• “Catastrophes à l’ancienne ferme, venez à la fois! L’oiseau de minuit a été tué par le tuteur d’un cauchemar!”

Now, I don’t speak French, so I make my best guess as to what this would sound like, phonetically (with apologies to anyone who does for the hatchet-job I am about to perpetrate on their language):

• “Catastroph alan-sien fer-me, venez ala fois! Loys-oo de min-wit a-ete tue-par le-tut-you-are dun corsh-em-ar!”

With a minute or two to practice a few times before the game, I can just about rattle that off in a pseudo-French accent and at least sound like I know what I’m doing.

Next, I take that French translation, and plug it back into Google translate to render it back into English:

• “Catastrophes à l’ancienne ferme, venez à la fois! L’oiseau de minuit a été tué par le tuteur d’un cauchemar!”

becomes

• “Catastrophes in the old farm, come at once! The bird midnight was killed by the guardian of a nightmare!”

The burst of faked French dialogue is followed by a “translation” based on this reverse-translation, also delivered in faux-French accent: “Mon Diu, he says there has been catastrophe at the old farm. Le black bird was killed by a monster who guards nightmares.”

Everything that follows is simply written in plain English (or improvised on the spot) and delivered with false French accent. Job done.

Bonus (marginally-relevant) tip: you can sometimes get ideas for the most wonderful mistranslations by taking the foreign-language version and spell-checking it using an appopriate dictionary (I write for an American audience, so I use an American English Dictionary):

• “Catastrophes e ancientness femme, veneer e la foist! Aloise de Minuit a étude tun par el hauteur dun gaucher!”

which I would render as

• “An old woman has exposed herself to the audience while doing the minute song in her best dress! It was catastrophic!”

Any resemblance between this translation and the “real” meaning are purely coincidental… :)

Conclusion

More than once, people have told me they “can’t do accents”. Heck, I’ve said it myself on occasion, because I can’t do real accents. But I can fake them – and now, so can you.