Accents

[RichGreen]

Hi,

I'm running a Skull & Bones campaign at the moment so have to do French, Spanish, Dutch and African accents. I try my best but most of them come out as generic Johnny Foreigner and the players fall about laughing ("where did you say you were from?" etc). Still, you've got to make the effort, haven't you?

Cheers


Richard

 

[Varianor Abroad]

I do accents. I do voice changes. I do speech pattern changes. It's all good if you can manage it. If you can't, your talents are well placed elsewhere.

One trick if you have the ear for it. Listen to foreign speakers who have mastered English. You will often pick up interesting dialectical variations from them.

 

[BullMarkOne]

I also do accents. I also do them badly. Just ask my last play by voice chat group about my crappy scottish accent.

In one of my many attempts to improve my ability to speak with bad accents I stumbled across a moderately useful website, which I'll post below. It's got a bunch of audio files of the same bit of text, repeated by various people from around the world. The files are organized by speaker's home region, and are accompanied by a phonetic transcription. All in all pretty handy stuff for imitating accents.

The speech accent archive:
http://accent.gmu.edu/index.php

 

[delericho]

Most of my characters have Scottish accents, whether dwarven or not.

However, I do try to inject different voices, accents and mannerisms into the speech of major characters.

 

[Hypersmurf]

My otyughs sound Jewish.

(Blame Jerry Nelson.)

-Hyp.

 

[Thurbane]

IMC, the base languages for the races are (loosely) based on the following "real world" languages:

Dwarf - German
Elves - Latin
Orcs - Turkish
Goblins - Spanish
Giants - Dutch
Dragons - Greek

 

[Ranger REG]

Mongolian isn't one of my stronger languages. Any pointers on accent?

Watch Conan the Barbarian.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My otyughs sound Jewish.

I suddenly flashed on John Byner from his work on the old Ant and Aardvark cartoons...he voiced the Aardvark as a Jackie Mason soundalike. Great stuff!

(For the record, he also did the Ant as a Dean Martin soundalike.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Aardvark

 

[tsadkiel]

Not an accent, but Ssleth, the lizardfolk druid of indeterminate gender in my C&C Taladas game, doesn't use pronouns.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

delericho
Most of my characters have Scottish accents, whether dwarven or not.

(Suspects delericho is, in real life, Sean Connery.)