Decree

[bloodyrosemccoy]

From now on, anyone who uses the words “quip” or “drawl” as a verb shall be slammed with a fine up to, but not exceeding, $250,000 and up to five years in jail.

Anyone who uses the words “quip” or “drawl” to describe a line of dialogue will be shot without trial.

That is all.

Comments

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Funetik Aksent can be okay in small doses, but when it's used for a large portion of the dialogue, it can get really tiresome really fast.

Recently somebody posted some Pogo the Possum on scans_daily, and one of the Mexican members (whose English is excellent) just couldn't read it at all, because it's all in a thick Southern accent spelled phonetically (and abounds with punny malapropisms).

My solution for the story that Ilion is meant to appear in is typography: English (standing in for the main human language) would use a pretty standard comic book hand-printed font for native speakers, while Ilion would use a curvier, pseudo-cursive typeface (with maybe some italic calligraphy influence). An English-speaker speaking Ilion with a marked accent, or an Ilion-speaker speaking English with a mild accent, would have dialogue slightly curvier than the pure hand-printed look; an English-speaker speaking Ilion with a mild accent, or an Ilion-speaker speaking English with a marked accent, would be slightly blockier than the "pure" Ilion font. Ilion-speakers speaking English may also have some accent marks pop up in their dialogue, to show how they get the placement of stress wrong (Ilion has regular stress).

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I like that! It's a lot more flexible than some of the other methods I've seen in comics (and actually in straight prose, too--Terry Pratchett uses Death's unique typeface to full advantage). My only concern there would be that readers could stumble over it if it gets too complicated--but I'm guessing that most people in your story would speak with similar accents, so you won't wind up with a different typeface for every person.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's really only three languages in the story: "English", Ilion, and the language of the Holopts (which I haven't named yet, but would have a pseudo-Cyrillic block letter typeface with serifs, and would make up a small fraction of dialogue).

While "phonetic misspellings" wouldn't appear, grammar would be affected by a character's native tongue. Someone with a mild accent (typographically close to the language's "correct" font) would probably not make errors very often, but may be slightly stilted; one with a strong accent would have difficulty with constructions that are very different from how their native language works, may use incorrect auxiliaries (directly translating the ones used by their own language), etc.

Holopts would be especially subject to this (since they're from far away and have little direct contact with either of the other groups), and their language is highly isolating with serial verb constructions and reduplication. The resulting errors would tend to reinforce the other cultures' stereotype of them as big, dumb, bloodthirsty barbarians.