Funetik Aksent - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Phonetic Accent

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A Funetik Aksent (Phonetic Accent) is dialogue spelled phonetically, so that it looks the way the character sounds.

Accents are one of the major ways of providing characterization. This creates a challenge for writers, since it's not just a matter of word choice and grammar. The same word can be pronounced very differently in different regional accents, let alone ethnic and foreign accents. Authors can get past that limitation with a phonetically spelled accent, sometimes called an "eye dialect" (because it looks how it sounds) or a "pronunciation respelling".

However, a Funetik Aksent has its downsides. Non-standard spellings can slow readers down, especially if English is not their native language, since they're likely more adept at reading standard written English than at deciphering an unfamiliar accent. Moreover, to do a Funetik Aksent well requires a keen ear for how people talk in the real world, and painstaking attention to detail to ensure that the accent is represented consistently throughout the text.

Also, since standard English is not spelled phonetically, a Funetik Aksent can be used to give the impression of an uneducated speaker, even when the pronunciation is perfectly standard (as with the name of this trope). The latter use has given the term "eye dialect" a negative connotation for some.

Littering the text with apostrophes is optional. See also Speech Bubbles, for alternative ways of conveying information about the characters' voices. And to read this article in a Funetik Aksent itself, see here.

Examples

Anime and Manga

In the English language translations of the Hellsing manga, Father Anderson has such a brogue that this troper has to go back and read his lines multiple times to figure out what he said.
- Which is especially funny seeing that he speaks completely normal Japanese in the original (along with the Germans and other characters who were given accents in the English adaptation).

Comic Books

This was once very common in Newspaper Comics. Li'l Abner, The Katzenjammer Kids, Krazy Kat, and Pogo are some of the best known examples (indeed, The Katzenjammer Kids remains the archetypal example of a bad, broken German accent in the English-speaking world, and comparisons to it are made by those who have never seen the original). As time went on and dialect humor fell out of favor, most mainstream comics have stuck to proper English.
A buttload in X-Men, such as Gambit and Rogue, courtesy of Chris Claremont.
- Gen X had Husk slip into a Kentucky accent when scared or stressed.
Cameron Spector from The Filth talks in an almost illegible Scots dialect.
At least one character in anything written by Grant Morrison.
In the comic version of V For Vendetta, a character with an absurdly thick Scottish accent shows up. Alan Moore renders the accent funetikally, doing such a good job that his printed speech bubbles are just as incomprehensible as hearing him speak would have been.
Platinum Grit uses phonetic accents for just about every character who isn't Australian, including a talking cupboard from Jamaica, a ridiculously German cafe owner, and a plethora of Scottish characters with accents so authentically thick and indecipherable that fans have actually asked for translations. And a different set of phonetic spelling for characters who aren't Scottish putting on bad fake scots accents.
Averted in Warren Ellis' run of The Authority where British, Tibetan, American, and Dutch characters have their dialog written in standard English...except when Jenny Sparks repeats something the Doctor says to tease him for his Dutch accent.
Used extensively in Preacher. Mainly for the Texan/Southern accents most of the cast possesses, but also a thick Irish one for Cassidy, and the gibberish of the facially-maimed Arseface, which somehow comes out actually readable if you sound it out.
Cerebus The Aardvark was the master of this, with everything from Chico Marx's fake Italian accent to Cerebus's cold to Alan Moore's Britishisms. This troper found himself baffled until he read everything aloud, whereupon it made surprisingly instant sense.
This is the whole point of Dutch comic series Haagse Harry, where anything and everything speaks phonetically transcribed Dutch with a very strong The Hague accent. And yes, it tends to be incomprehensible unless read out loud.
Willie Garvin, Modesty Blaise's Cockney sidekick, drops his aitches and frequently exclaims, "Blimey!"
- Lady Janet Gillam, who's Scottish, tends to begin her sentences with "Och..."
Julius, kommandant of Das Primate Patrol in The DCU, a gorilla with, uhm, fascist leanings, speaks with an atypically phoenetic German accent. "I'm gonna krush you all, grint you inda dusd! "I'm an aybe. Dad's how I rdoll."
- Not to mention Captain Fear, with his Spanish accent and "debil may care" attitude. "I'm da ghoaz, but I can e'see righ' t'roo joo, Doagtar Dirteen."
Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge Mc Duck has Scrooge's family, Scrooge himself included, speaking in Scottish accents. Both Scrooge and his sisters drop their accents after moving to America.
Mazekeen of Sandman and the Lucifer comics doesn't so much have an accent as she only has half a face. Nonetheless, Neil Gaiman wrote all her dialogue by transcribing what he thought he sounded like when he tried to talk with only one side of his mouth, resulting in fully funetikally-rendered lines.
Used effectively in 100 Bullets to show accents of the Urban, Southern and Louisiana variety.
The Asterix comics do it with some people, such as the Arvernes.
Most of th' characters of Bone.
Mosta' the cast of Wet Moon, too—it is the moderately Deep South—but especially sweet redneck Fall Swanhilde. "Hey Paw, burgers're dunn!"
Bunnie Rabbot and Antoine D'Coolette of Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog, who are respectively Texan and French.
Most of the American Disney comics featuring José Carioca or Panchito give them phonetic accents even though their accents aren't nearly that thick in the movies they appear in.
In the Scottish newspaper comic The Broons (the Browns) every single charcter speaks like this- in a thick Scottish accent, of course. For this English troper, reading the strips as a child, half the fun was working out what they were actually saying...
Monterey Jack has a slight Funetik Aksent in the official Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers comics. In Fan Fic and Fan Web Comics, especially Of Mice And Mayhem, this is often done to the extreme since they're based on the animated series.
In the German Werner comics, characters without a Funetik Aksent are quite rare. Most characters speak with an assortment of Northern German dialects or even Lower German which have realistic representations in the Speech Bubbles.

Literature

As indicated by the quote, the ur-example might be Mark Twain's regional dialects.
- This Troper personally spent several painstaking minutes staring at a page of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn before he realized "shet de do" is funetik for "shut the door."
  - This troper couldn't even finish half of Jim's lines before she had to give up on the book altogether and read about the plot on Spark Notes. There goes my Summer Reading.
  - Having seen a few old films with black people in makes it pretty easy.
Done pretty risibly throughout Dracula. A particularly egregious example is the old Yorkshireman; the edition this troper read noted that his use of 'belly-timber' was ridiculously archaic and that nobody would have really said this. It went on to note that Bram Stoker was very proud of what he considered his incredible ability in writing accents.
Fleur Delacour's French accent in Harry Potter is a case that isn't always consistent. Sometimes she says "think," and sometimes, as in her Crowning Moment Of Awesome-slash-Heartwarming, she says "theenk." Also Hagrid.
Done a lot in Dorothy L. Sayers novels.
The Grand High Witch in The Witches had a similar accent, but it was supposed to be Norwegian.
Jane Eyre
- Also Joseph (and practically everyone else in Heathcliff's household, but the main offender is Joseph) of Wuthering Heights.
Stephen King often does this with New England characters.
- Oh, ayuh.
Irvine Welsh does this heavily with the Scottish dialect.
- The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, trying no tae notice the cunt. He wis bringing me doon. Ah tried to keep ma attention oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video.
The Sound and the Fury is told by an idiot with a Funetik Aksent to match.
This editor defies anyone to decipher the Uncle Remus stories on the first reading.
HP Lovecraft loved to do this; most notably in The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow over Innsmouth.
Later Oz books give Dorothy more farmgirl colloquialisms, presumably to differentiate her from the other little girls in the book series.
Iain M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn has a viewpoint character, Bascule, whose entire sections are written in a funetik aksent - it takes a while to register that the character is actually very intelligent despite this, it doesn't help that he also does things like spell "have" as "1/2" and his overall inconsistency in his spelling.
Jumps in and out for Scotty in differing books of the Star Trek franchise fiction, depending on the author. Sometimes his accent is spelled phonetically, other times its presence is just noted in the prose.
- The same goes for Chekov.
  - William Shatner in particular favours "vw" for Chekov's 'nuclear wessels' accent, which is somewhat difficult to read.
The original novel of Forrest Gump (which is a lot funnier than The Film Of The Book, btw) is written in Forrest's Southern dialect.
Manly Wade Wellman slips in some of this in his Silver John stories, all set in the (very) backwoods of Appalachia.
Redwall. The mice, otters, etc. tend to speak normally (apart from the random Scottish characters here and there). However, Rats have a sort of broken cockney-slash-pirate speak, the Shrews seem to lisp, and Moles? The mole-speech is almost incomprehensible.
- Moles speak with West Country accents - the same as Hagrid, but written even more phonetically. This troper has met real people who sound like that.
- The Hares on the other hand have a Verbal Tic modelled after the stereotypical 19th/early 20th century British miliary officer, ending most sentences with "wot".
- Somewhat reported in the italian translation of the book, with the Funetik Aksent being italian ones complete of dialect words. (The Hares speaks like Tuscany peoples and the Moles in south italy [Naples] accent, all reported literally on paper.) Also their names has been translated to stereotypical names from such places.
- Incomprehensible? Hurr, oi grew up readin' 'ee gaffer Redwall books, burr aye.
  - When this troper finally got some of her friends to read the series, she was confused to find that they found the moles hard to understand and often just skipped their dialogue. 'Ee mus' depend on 'ow yurr brains be woired, oi 'spect. Somebeasts jus' 'ave 'ee better 'ead furr funetik aksents.
  - This troper tried to read some of the Redwall series a few years ago, and while having a grade 12+ reading level, still found it made the book incredibly annoying to read, and I have never bothered with that damn series again.... and the cartoon sucked.
One character in a Xanth novel speaks with a lisp; all the "s"s in his speech are replaced with the letter "v", except when he says the word "island" (in which the "s" is silent). One of the other characters asks if it should have been "ivland", to which the lisping character responds, "Whatever for?" Interestingly, when the narrator momentarily changes focus to the lisping character, his speech is normal and the other characters have extra "s"s in their speech, as though they were hissing.
Averted - for no good reason - in the Book Version of the PBS miniseries Do you Speak American? The whole point of the series was to show how English is spoken differently in different parts of the US, but even when directly quoting people using non-standard US dialects the book prints it in standard spelling, so the point is lost.
Any American novel that involves soldiers from the UK and a Lieutenant. Whenever one of the pom's say that officers rank, its always 'Leftenant'. Tom Clancy is extremely fond of this, and Call of Duty had Price say this once (subtitles say 'Leftenant')
- There's an accent that pronounces "lieu" as "lef"?! This troper was under the impression that that was just an idiomatic pronunciation.
  - It's Old French, bitch.
- This is really just Truth in Television plus a bit of ignorance. In most English-speaking Commonwealth nations' armed forces, including Canada and Australia, any rank with "Lieutenant" in it does get pronounced Lef-tenant. Although the bilingual nature of the Canadian Armed Forces does mix this up a bit; French regiments using the French-based pronunciation, and a historical distaste in the Royal Canadian Navy for the "ugly" Army prounuciation of Lef-tenant. Nevertheless, the above Troper is correct and the American pronunciation is closer to the French due to the evolution of American English during the 19th Century.
Vaska Denisov in War And Peace is said to swallow his R's when talking, which the translators decided to replicate by putting "gh" in front of any R's in any words he says. It takes some getting used to.
- The Ann Dunnigan translation either omits the R's or turns them into W's, which makes poor Denisov sound like he has a speech impediment.
Horrible Science magazine once showed an American and a Russian trying to launch rockets in a comic strip. Both failed. The American said "Rats!", the Russian said "Ratz!"
Their Eyes Were Watching God gets a lot easier to read once you realize that the dialect is mostly phonetic with less than dazzling grammar.
- Says you. This troper had to practically read the book out loud to herself to understand some of the sentences.
John Kennedy Toole took great care to transcribe the accents of his New Orleans characters as perfectly as possible in A Confederacy Of Dunces. Whoa!
Terry Pratchett does it a lot, too - the Nac Mac Feegle are a whole race of tiny Violent Glaswegians, Granny Weatherwax's warning sign for when she's out "borrowing" reads I aten't dead (admittedly that's more because spelling's optional in most parts of the Disc), and Death even speaks in his own font.
- Not to mention the Igorth, who lithp, even in wordth where it would be unneceththeththary.
  - And are apparently doing it on purpose. The more modern ones occasionally forget, and will on occasion forgo it when they need to explain something really complicated, like in Making Money.
The book Good Omens, coauthored by Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, uses and parodies this with Shadwell, whose accent is described as an arbitrary and inconsistent mixture of British regional dialects.
Used quite a bit- and much mocked in fandom- in The Babysitters Club, from the Australian family the Hobarts, to Jessie's French ballet teacher, to Logan's Kentucky accent, to his brother's "allergy dialect".
Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw The Angel (which is like a cross between William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez) is narrated by a nut from the Deep South, so the whole book is like this. Here's a sample:
Ah cannot, in all honesty, state the exact age ah was when ah first entered the swampland.
Rudyard Kipling wrote many poems with characters speaking in a stereotypical Cockney accent, to the point that George Orwell considered it irritatingly condescending and opined, in an essay, that they read much better if you added all the aiches back.
Many of the servants and lower-class characters in The Secret Garden speak in phonetic Cockney.
Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming has James Bond and Felix Leiter overhear a conversation between two people in Harlem. The long arguement and makeup between the black couple is done in the "negro dialect". The conversation doesn't even HAVE a purpose other than to show, how black Americans speak according to Fleming.
Done badly in Maximum Ride, where Roland ter Borcht speaks in a clichéd, thick German accent — to the point where some fans have mistaken it for a French accent.
The Moorchild features toned down but clearly Scottish dialect, being set in Scotland. Since each and every one of the characters had it, this troper found herself thinking in it for a few days after finishing it.
To Kill A Mockingbird had a small bit of this as one character would slip in an out of a dialect.
Used by Vladimir Nabokov in Bend Sinister when a native French speaker switches the language of conversation to English to flatter protagonist Krug, who he knows is an Anglophone. In the few sentences we get of it, his grammar is note-perfect, but Nabokov sneeringly describes his English skills as "textbook." So it's probably used to underscore his ineptitude and the general tackiness of the character. For similar reasons, some poshlosty characters who attempt using French on Humbert Humbert in Lolita have their dialogue rendered in atrocious American accents.
Averted in Flowers For Algernon: since it's in journal format, those are spelling mistakes, not phonetics.

Musical

The book and lyrics to Oklahoma! are rendered this way, including the song titles ("I Cain't Say No," "Pore Jud is Daid," etc.).
- Similarly, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers has the song titles "Bless Yore Beautiful Hide" and "Goin' Co'tin'".
In Pygmalion, Eliza's dialogue is at first spelled phonetically. Shaw got sick of writing it that way and, with an explanatory note, switched to standard spelling partway through.

Tabletop RPG

Orcs and Orks in Warhammer and Warhammer 40000, with a Cockney-like Accent.
- Also, and more obviously, whenever the W 40 K Orks are quoted in writing, virtually every word is misspelled. Boyz, Deffkoptas, Meks, etc. even ORC.
Cultist-chan: "Whee are captoring waffles for kayoss."

Video Games

Most of the characters in Chrono Cross have accents in the English translation, in order to add variety to what would otherwise be interchangeable snippets of dialogue spoken by whatever characters you happened to have in your party at the time.
- This was an attempt to come up with an English equivalent to different ways of speaking Japanese.
May account for Ultimecia's bizarre "Kursed SeeDs! You will not stop me from achieving Time Kompression!" speech patterns in Final Fantasy VIII. May be a somewhat dubious way of making her sound "Russian". Or may be just Xtreme Kool Letterz.
- Which really doesn't make a lick of sense given that she is well-spoken in Japanese, wherein the most interesting thing about her dialogue is the dissonance between how she speaks (polite construction) and what she says (being a cutting bitch and all). So really, it was probably an attempt at a Woolseyism of some sort, that just ended up as poor translation choice and caused Narm to gum up her big reveal.
In Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon, Athena replaces all W's with V's. She speaks as if she is two separate people, both with the same accent.
In Grand Theft Auto IV, one character speaks Rastafarian English, and another Jamaican Patois. They're nearly unintelligable despite technically speaking the same language. Their dialogue is rendered phoenetically in the subtitles too, rendering them almost useless for deciphering them.
- This is perhaps lampshaded to a degree when the character speaking Rastafarian (The one who can be half-way understood at points) has to translate for Nico Belic (The Player Character) and by extension, the player, the other character speaking Jamacian Patois. Truthfully, the 'translation' didn't help much.
The DS remake of Dragon Quest IV added this to the new English translation. For example, in the first town the people speak with thick Scottish accents.
- This has pretty much been the case with all Dragon Quest localizations since Dragon Quest VIII.
In the MMORPG Urban Dead, the zombies are limited to only a handful of letters, meaning the language invented by creative players is entirely phonetic. For example, "zombie" is spelled "zambah" and human is spelled "harman".
O' Chunks from Super Paper Mario also talks like this, and some characters have their own speech bubbles (Tippi's rainbow border, Mimi's purple speech bubble for her true form, etc.)
The German Lieselotte Achenbach of Arcana Heart uses this together with the occasional Gratuitous German when she speaks.

Web Comics

The jägermonsters (monstrous-looking soldiers transformed by Mad Science) in Phil Foglio's steampunk comic Girl Genius have silly "Germanic"-sounding phonetic accents. Even more bizarre given that, although the comic itself is written in English, the main characters are actually speaking in German and Romanian (as confirmed by the Foglios on the Yahoo Group fanforum) and the only British character speaks without any phonetical accent. Maybe it's the pointy teeth...
- The Foglios have described the Jaegermonsters as "The Mongol Horde, staffed by the Katzenjammer Kids".
- One could argue Wooster's simply especially good at being fluent. While he does once and awhile flaunt his Britishness to people he knows and likes and/or who are already in the know (like Gil), having an obvious accent would somewhat put a dent in his spy capabilities should the moment arise.
In The Order Of The Stick, Durkon has a Scots-like accent; this is lampshaded on more than one occasion ("He can pronounce 'stratosphere' but not 'the'?").
- At one point he writes a letter in the same manner. When told he didn't have to transcribe his accent, he responds "Transcribe my what now?"
- One of the prequel books reveals that the OOTS universe has a spell called "Comprehend Inconsistent Accents" specifically for dealing with such characters. It causes a translated speech bubble to appear alongside the character's regular one.
Gunnerkrigg Court renders some characters' accents this way: Surma's Yorkshire accent, Zimmy's (presumably) Birmingham accent, and Red's completely fictional accent. On the other hand, the main characters avert this: Antimony has a slight Yorkshire accent and Kat has a slight Scottish accent, but we only know this because Word Of God says so.
JD, the scientist Space Pirate from the webcomic Metroid: Third Derivative (named himself after "the greatest pirate in human history: Johnny Depp"), speaks with a German accent. ("Just take ze damn veapon already.") At least, his W's are written as V's, and his S's are Z's. When he's alone, though, he sometimes drops the accent. ("Thank God, now I can drop this stupid accent I used to impress the idiot.")
- And on one occasion: "And vhat is ze deal with my accent! It rages out of my control!"
Averted with the Dr Mc Ninja villain Frans Rayner. The Alt Text in the strip in which he is introduced reads:
I'm afraid you'll have to imagine Frans's accent without my help. It looks just far too silly typed phonetically.
In Misfile garage owner Harry has the most appalling Cockney/Welsh fusion accent that has ever been this editor's misfortune to read. Thankfully his appearances are rare.
- That's because it's Just For Pun; his garage is called "Aries".
Lackadaisy has several examples: Viktor (Slovak), Aunt Nina (Irish) and the Savoys (Cajun).
Kroenen and Johann Krauss of Abe Kroenen both have phonetic German accents (and Krauss speaks in his own capslock font).
Tony from Charby the Vampirate speaks with a very strong accent that may or may not be intended to be something Germanic. (Elements of his backstory indicate that Tony came from Germany or somewhere thereabouts, but the accent is not recognizable as such.)
- It's a 1920's New York gangster-speak accent (hence the preference for the word "youse") mixed with a slight lisp and his natural Germanic accent.
Dwalin the Dwarf from Irregular Webcomic speaks with a hoots-mon style scottish accent that is spelt out phonetically in the comic itself. Generally it's perfectly easy to understand so long as you're familiar with the scottish vernacular "ken" which means "know". The "vision impaired transcript" however provides the phonetic version and a translation, like so:
Dwalin: So, hoo mooch of thus epic quist ye're on ha' ye achivved soo far? {translation: So, how much of this epic quest you're on have you achieved so far?}

Web Original

Keith Jackson and Maxie Dasai in Survival Of The Fittest both have their accents rendered in the dialogue itself. Notably, their accents are almost identical.
- This troper, as Maxie's handler, has been told more than once that people sometimes struggle to understand her speech.
In scripts for This troper's flash cartoons (which I won't Entry Pimp for once), he likes to write certain characters' lines like this in order that the voice actor can deliver the inflections as hilariously as possible. It backfired on me once: "Li-owl gewl" was interpreted as "Lil' ol' girl" rather than "Little girl", ruining the comedic value of the joke.
Zer Germans in AH Dot Com The Series. As well as the Funetik Aksent, they also evoke German grammar by e.g. capitalising nouns.

Other

Read many forums on 'talk like a pirate day' an be sure ya sorery wretchers bain't so cussed blinded tha cha cannaugh make 'eads er tailses uv wot we's been sayings.
- Don't forget LO Lspeak. Givz me hedakes bi lokin at it. I mean: gives me headaches by looking at it...
In the Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams (no, not that one,) some of the sample text, rather than being lorem ipsum, she has a very extreme Funetik Aksent version of fairy tales. So extreme that at first, and even third glance, it looks like just a bunch of random words thrown together.
- Example: "Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock florist.
- Translation: "Once upon a time, there was a littler girl who lived with her mother in a little cottage on the edge of a large, dark forest.
  - That's not extreme Funetik Aksent, that's extreme use of homonyms.
The LPer Electrical Beast is probably an example of a human actually talking like an Ork.

Real Life

From the perspective of a speaker of English, the Scots language is this trope, with a few foreign words. (see the Scots Wikipedia for examples.)
- From the perspective of a speaker of Scots, the English language is this trope, with a lot of foreign words and some bizarre spelling. (see the English Wikipedia for examples.)
Most foreign languages are actually spelled phonetically as a rule, while Italian has a word that means "to spell" it is rarely used to describe Italian (they just use the world that means "to write").
- Haitian Creole too.
- Also Spanish.
  - Are you sure? In this troper's experience, native speakers get confused if you ask "¿Cómo se escribe?" instead of "¿Cómo se deletrea?" When asking the former, the more sarcastic ones will say: "with a pen, of course."
  - That could also be a joke based on the fact that deletrear is to spell orally while escribir is spell when writing. Remember that Spanish is not entirely phonetic. You can pronounce any given written word correctly from its spelling, but the spelling of some sounds (like B/V and C/S/Z) isn't predictable from speech, so the question is more common than in totally phonetic languages.
- Hungarian as well.
- Most languages that have a written language younger than five hundred years are this trope. Examples include Icelandic and Japanese roman.
- And also Serbian.
- Also Filipino.
- There are no languages in which the written form functions as a phonetic transcription. There is always variance in the spoken form.
When John F. Kennedy held his speech at the Berlin Wall, he had a note with the foreign language sentences: "Ish bin ein Bearleener" and "kiwis Romanus sum". Correct German and Latin spelling is "Ich bin ein Berliner" and "Civis Romanus sum". And no, he did not say that he was a jelly doughnut. Live with it.
- In German, if you wanted to say that you were a resident of Berlin, you would say "Ich bin Berliner." "Berliner" refers to a person, "ein Berliner" refers to an object (i.e. a type of jelly doughnut originating in Berlin). His meaning was obvious, but the alternate interpretation is still hilarious (e.g. it's grammatically equivalent to someone going to Hamburg and saying "Ich bin ein Hamburger").
- NO, NO, NO!!! You have no idea what you are talking about! God, I’m so sick and tired of you wannabe experts who hear some bullshit and keep spreading it even after being corrected by a German! „Ich bin ein Berliner” is completely correct and noone had any reason to think of jelly doughnuts!
This troper has known people on the internet to type with an accent.
- It's very common among Scots

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