Follow TV Tropes

Following

Funetik Aksent
aka: Phonetic Accent

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lotte-sm_4334.png
No. No I don't fawlluw.Probable Translation

"Ye sayin' that fowk cannae mak' oot whit Ah'm sayin'? Whit's wrang wi' the way Ah'm sayin' whit ah'm sayin'?"

A Funetik Aksent (Phonetic Accent) is dialogue spelled phonetically so that it looks the way the character sounds to someone with another accent. Since accents are one of the major ways of providing characterization, this is an easy shortcut to force the reader to act out the character correctly (admittedly at the cost of confusing those reading outside their language, and slowing those who aren't).

Though typically used now to highlight an exaggerated, clichéd and/or hammy character, this trope is famous for its somewhat bad-taste perpetuating of stereotypes in the past, portraying various cultures as less educated/intelligent/literate; a classic example is Gone with the Wind, where the black slaves' and poor whites' accents are given phonetically but the white owners' accent (which is every bit as thick) isn't.

Not all examples are bigoted, particularly if race or class-consciousness is a deliberate theme or issue in the work in question, such as George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Accents in real life are notoriously used to pigeonhole people, so reproducing a foreign or nonstandard accent may be a way of realistically or critically highlighting this social gap.

One of many subtropes under Accent Tropes and Language Tropes. Littering the text with apostrophes is optional. See also Speech Bubbles, for alternative ways of conveying information about the characters' voices, and Psmith Psyndrome, in which characters insist that someone else is using the wrong Funetik Aksent. And to read this article in a Funetik Aksent itself, see here.

To some more phonetic-savvy people, the accent might not be phonetic at all. "Funetik", using default phonetic rules, would be pronounced "few-nitt-ick".

Not to be confused with Xtreme Kool Letterz, which is about deliberately switching letters to make a word fancy. See also Unintelligible Accent.

The Other Wiki refers to Funetik Aksents as "literary dialects."


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • This trope exists in Japanese manga as well with the name of katagoto in Japanese: Thick accents will probably be rendered phonetically in one of the Japanese syllabaries or "kana" (most of the time, in katakana) instead of the standard "mixed script" with is made up by using Kanji (ideographic characters) and Kana. Native accents may be spelled in standard scripts and bear "furigana" (small kana over kanji) in phonetic spelling. Foreign accents will be rendered with lot of katakana and only few kanji, to imply a lack of fluency.
  • The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You:
    • The English scanlation gives Yamame an Irish accent.
    • In the official English publication, a mall security guard has an extremely thick Oop North dialect.
  • In Yen Press's English translation of the Azumanga Daioh manga, Osaka's Kansai accent is adapted as a Southern accent written this way. Most obviously, she uses "Ah" and "mah" rather than "I" and "my".
  • In the English translation of the Dragon Ball manga, the dialogue of characters such as Son Goku, Chi-Chi, Yajirobe, and Kuririn (“Krillin”) are all written like this with mild consistency (e.g. and becomes an’) to fit their rural origins. This tapers off by the time the manga transitions into the “Z” portion, however.
  • The English translation of the Excel♡Saga manga gives Sumiyoshi, his sister and father a Geordie accent that's written this way.
  • In the English language translations of the Hellsing manga, Father Anderson speaks with an immensely thick brogue, or at least an attempt at one.
  • One chapter of Stop Hibari Kun features an old friend of Kousaku's from Kumamoto with an accent so thick it requires subtitles in one scene, and in a flashback to before he moved to Tokyo, Kousaku is shown as having an accent just as severe.
  • In Summer Time Rendering, most of the main cast and townsfolk talk in the Kansai (Wakayama-ben) regional accent. This is localized in English translation to a phonetic drawl that brings to mind Steinbeck's dialect style at times.
    Totsumura: Whassa matter, Mio-chan? Watcha staring at yer own house for?

    Comic Books 
  • Until well into The Silver Age of Comic Books, this was pretty standard for foreign or immigrant characters of any kind, even if they were heroes. Take Mademoiselle Marie, a French Resistance fighter in a series of World War II adventures put out by DC in the 1950s. Marie was an Action Girl and looked every bit the part with her tight skirt, even tighter sweater, bright red beret, and Sten gun - but all this was undercut somewhat because the letterer insisted on writing all of her lines as if they were being spoken by Pepe Le Pew.

  • Used effectively in 100 Bullets to show accents of the Urban, Southern and Louisiana variety.

  • In All-Star Western, Jonah Hex's dialogue has a Southern accent to it - he pronounces "I" as "Ah", for instance.
  • In American Splendor, Harvey Pekar gives a Funetik Aksent to almost every character. Unlike most of the examples here, he doesn't have characters who speak "proper" English, so it doesn't leave an impression of lingual esual brain pattern. It doesn't help that the computer pulls out oddities like spelling "have" as "1/2" and the overall inconsistency in the spelling.
  • The Asterix comics do it with some people, such as the Averni tribe in Asterix and the Chieftain's Daughter, who jpeak in an acjent where "s" jounds are replajed by "j"s.
  • Atomic Robo: James Milligan, aka Scottie, speaks almost entirely in nigh-incomprehensible Scottishisms.
    Scottie: Yer lookin' a wee bit peely-wally, eh?
    Robo: What?
    Scottie: Le's shoot the craw, aye?
    Robo: Is this some kind of secret commando code they didn't tell me about?

  • Used to represent the cockney accent of most of the punks, and some of the police in Baker Street.
  • Batman:
    • Robin (1993): Jaeger's German accent is spelled out on the page to make it clear he's not a Gotham native even before any of his background is disclosed.
    • Batman: Black and White: The gunman in "Dead Boys Eyes".
      "Dis time it's gonna be ya ass dat rots in a dark, cold concrete cell. But'cha ain't gonna be gettin' out like me."
  • Blake and Mortimer:
    • "Condouisez ploutôt aoune brouette" ("you'd better drive a wheelbarrow" - without trying to reproduce the phonetic American accent), by an American soldier yelling on a French taxi driver in S.O.S. Meteors.
    • One of Mortimer's first hints that he's in the Bad Future is when he sees the station names written like this. The rebel leader tells him that it was one of the reasons for the civil war.
  • Most of th' characters of Bone, an' Jeff Smith claims Pogo as a big influence. It's one of the few things the people of the Valley and Boneville Bones seem to have in common.

  • 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.
  • Monterey Jack has a slight Funetik Aksent in the official Chip 'n 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.

  • The DCU:
    • Julius, kommandant of Das Primate Patrol in a gorilla with 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."
    • 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."
    • Subverted by Crimson Fox. Twin French sisters sharing a heroic identity. One spoke wiz ze accent while the other did not.
  • The Dead Boy Detectives: The German Frederika's pronunciation of certain words are spelled out in the notes.
    Frederika: You are not even wearing warm chakets*, what stupit heads!
    * - jackets, stupid, (German accent)
  • Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
    • In Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Scrooge's family, Scrooge himself included, speak in Scottish accents. Both Scrooge and his sisters drop their accents after moving to America.
    • Arpin Lusene, the French Gentleman Thief. Complete with a Shout-Out to Monty Python and the Holy Grail (outrageous accent).
      Donald: The card says "Mon Cher Monsieur Meekdook! If ah cannut stil yoor trofeese or your mooney bean, zen allow me to add to it! Merci Beaucoup for the game fantastique!"
      Scrooge: Why are you reading with his ridiculous accent?
      Donald: Because he even writes with that outrageous accent! Look!
    • 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. The most obvious example is the actual adaptation of The Three Caballeros, where the accents are so over the top, that they're toned down in reprintings (eliminating a few jokes making fun of them in the process).

  • In Fantastic Four, The Thing has a very thick New York accent.
    The Thing: "It's Clobberin' Time!"
  • Mirror Master from The Flash has a phonetically-spelled Scottish accent - when he's written by Grant Morrison. In the hands of other writers, it tends to come out more like Cockney.
  • Joseph Merrick's dialogue in From Hell:
    Yu nho, wen bhey fhee me, moft peeble fcreem or loff or fubtibes bhey pwetebb I luk perfecky orbimary. Yhur hobbesty ib moft wefweffing.

  • The Golden Age Green Lantern's sidekick Doiby Dickles has a Brooklyn accent so pronounced, even his nickname uses it (he's named after the derby he wears).

  • 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.
  • Kroenen and Johann Krauss of Hellboy both have phonetic German accents (and Krauss speaks in his own capslock font).

  • Indiana Jones comics tend to do this with the Nazis. "You vill not escape, Dr. Chones!"

  • In the Marvel Mystery Comics:
    • The Masked Raider western series, every character is written with an accent, such a "git" instead of "get" and "heah" for "here".
    • The Mafia enemies in Human Torch stories tend to be written with "Joisey" accents.
  • In the Monica's Gang subset Chuck Billy 'n' Folks the hillbilly accent of the protagonist, and most of the cast in fact, is rendered as this.
  • At least one character in anything written by Grant Morrison. Cameron Spector from The Filth talks in an almost illegible Scots dialect. This was likely meant to be a bit of self-deprecation on the part of its creator, Grant Morrison, who also has an impenetrable Scottish accent.

  • The Pinky and the Brain comic had "Verminator", a parody of Terminator that for obvious reasons spoke with a phonetic Austrian accent.
  • Preacher uses this rather sparingly, considering how many accents get bandied about. Most Texans get away with a dropped letter here and there, such as "an'" instead of "and," and Cassidy's Irish accent mostly comes out only in his catchphrase "Jaysis!" People occasionally mention that Starr has a German accent, but not a trace of it is evident in the spelling of his speech. The biggest example of the trope is the facially-maimed Arseface, whose speech is so garbled by his handicap that he's often given a translation.

  • In the Radioactive Man comics, Dr. Crab is supposed to be a hideously mutated Russian, but his accent looks like a wild mixture of Russian and German sounds. This is finally explained in Radioactive Man's last adventure, where it's revealed that the Germans had forced the (communist) Crab to conduct experiments for them during the Nazi era.
  • In Roy Thomas' Anthem, Stonewall has a heavy Southern accent, so his speech is peppered with apostrophes where there should be consonants.

  • Mazekeen of The Sandman (1989) 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.
  • The Scamp comics love this. Any particular breed of dog is highly likely to have an accent from where the breed comes from.
  • Bunnie Rabbot and Antoine D'Coolette of Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), who are respectively Texan and French.
  • In Strontium Dog, Middenface, and occasionally other Scottish characters, speaks with an accent so thick it is sometimes incomprehensible. Middenface even writes in the same thick Glaswegian. Wulf has a Norwegian accent, which is much easier to follow. Welsh and Irish accents also turn up occasionally, but those are mostly implied by the characters' vocabulary.
  • Superman: While it's not always obvious in the text, it has sometimes been observed that Kryptonians have a rather noticeable accent. In Supergirl (Rebirth), Kara Danvers has a weird lilt and struggles with contractions ("They do not exist in Kryptonian"), to the point her accent has been mocked by her schoolmates. Ironically, she has previously noted "[Superman's] accent sounds like he learned Kryptonian from a textbook".

  • In Tintin it is common for "natives" to speak something which appears incomprehensible until spoken aloud, as a way of showing they speak no other language. For example, the Amazonian tribesmen in The Broken Ear have speech bubbles which appear to be full of gibberish, but if read aloud turn out to be English with a strong Cockney accent. This is not a Funetik Aksent per se, as it's incomprehensible to other characters (unless they speak the language) rather than simply hard to understand - but it's a related phenomenon. In the original French, a lot of the "foreign" languages are actually the Brussels dialect of Flemish given an exotic (not phonetic) spelling. For instance, Bordurian is this "Marollien" dressed up as a Slavic or other kind of language spoken in the Balkans.

  • V for Vendetta has Alistair Harper, who speaks with a thick Scottish accent. Alan Moore renders the accent funetikally.

  • 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.
  • Mosta' the cast of Wet Moon, too - it is the moderately Deep South - but especially sweet redneck Fall Swanhilde. "Hey Paw, burgers're dunn!"
  • During their date in an Italian restaurant, Wilq and Słaby Wielbłąd make an order for ryżotto and szpageti, the latter one being an example of Gratuitous German too.
  • Many of the characters in Wild's End have strong cockney accents. "Thing" becomes 'fing' and "home" becomes 'ome' among other indicators.

  • A buttload in X-Men, courtesy of Chris Claremont:
    • Gambit's Cajun accent.
    • Rogue's Southern accent.
    • Moira MacTaggert and Rahne Sinclair's "Scottish" accent, and the adjacent Banshee's Irish accent. In one instance, Moira managed to go between "yer", "yuir" and "your" in the space of a page.
    • Cannonball and his family's Kentuckian accent.
    • It's been said Claremont only put Wolverine on the team because he wanted to write a Canadian accent.
    • Generation X had Husk slip into a Kentucky accent when scared or stressed.
    • One particular issue of X-Force reveals that Cannonball actually writes in a phonetic accent.

    Comic Strips 
  • This was once very common in Newspaper Comics, with The Katzenjammer Kids, Krazy Kat, Li'l Abner, Pogo, and Snuffy Smith being some of the better-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, although Snuffy still exhibits it in a milder form.

  • In the Scottish newspaper comic The Broons ("The Browns") every single character speaks like this- in a thick Scottish accent.
  • The children's magazine Cricket had a brief example in a strip where the main characters took a trip to Australia and were alarmed by a local worm asking them "Did you come to die?" When the follow-up question was "Or did you come yester-die?", they realized what was going on.
  • Invoked in a series of Dilbert strips in which Dogbert temporarily becomes a militant animal-rights activist. He protests in front of a store with a "Fur Sale" sign, until the owner informs him that he's not selling fur; the entire store is "fur sale" (for sale). Dogbert retorts that incorrect spelling offends him just as much.
  • In Swedish comic Elvis (no relation), the title character does this from time to time when speaking English. Also, he's the only one who does this. This Running Gag has mostly faded out, but still crops up from time to time. Examples:
    Airport security man: Are you wearing any knife?
    Elvis: Eny najf? Nå, böt aj näver gå änyver vizååt... [Any knife? No, but I never go anywhere without...]
    Airport security man: (Gilligan Cut to having wrestled Elvis to the ground, calling for backup) He says he's wearing a Magnum!
    Elvis: It vas a djååk!!! [It was a jooke!!!]

    Store clerk: Hi, how're you doing, sir?
    Elvis: Ajm fajn, tänk ju. Hau ar ju? [I'm fine, thank you. How are you?]
    Store clerk: Thatnote 'll be.
    Elvis: Ålrajt. (pats self) Jöst a se... Oops. It siims aj häv ran aut of käsh.! [Alright. (pats self) Just a se... Oops. It seems I have run out of cash!]
  • In Steve Bell's If, you get American televangelists who cry Prize the Lard!, and a recurring character, an avant-guard French artist, calls those who cannot see his artistic vision a bunch of ouanquéres!
  • Modesty Blaise:
    • Willie Garvin, Modesty's Cockney sidekick, drops his aitches and frequently exclaims, "Blimey!"
    • Lady Janet Gillam, who's Scottish, tends to begin her sentences with "Och..."
  • Non Sequitur strips taking place in Whatchacallit, Maine have Flo and Captain Eddie use New England accents in this manner.
  • The male crocs in Pearls Before Swine speak in a funetik aksent ("Hullo, zeeba neighba?") which is also rendered in mixed-case instead of all-caps. There is a boy croc who speaks normally, but still refers to Zebra as "zeeba neighba."
  • Popeye got into the habit, too, in Elzie Segar's attempt to accurately transcribe a "sailor" voice.
    Popeye: They's three things wich I loves most of all on this Eart an' tha's this, wimen - chil'ren - dumb aminals - widowsnote  - horshes - ol' folks - an' spinach.
  • Mimi in Rose is Rose. This is a child learning to speak more than an actual accent, however. Rose's son Pasquale used to speak like that as well but eventually grew out of it.

    Fan Works 
  • Adjacency: With Applejack's Southern accent, like in "Chapter 1: Nothing Ventured…":
    "G'mornin' you two!" smiled Applejack, standing behind her familiar apple cart. "I was startin' to wonder when I'd see ya'll come out and pay the world a visit again."
  • Aftermath of a Fallen Star: Marc, a dragon Snake Oil Salesman on Erebus is written with thick Glaswegian accent.
  • In A Posse Ad Esse, every time Dolly switches to English, she develops a Scottish accent. In fact, the author has even admitted elsewhere that she writes this accent by running the sentences through "British dialect translator" whoohoo.co.uk.
    "Aye, I caused a fire, and I feel terrible fur it. But he- it's jist nae... he triggered me wi' nae warnin'. He's a doctur, he shood ken 'at isnae okay."
  • In Ask the Ryans, the Ryans' Irish accents are rendered through altercations in the text (ex. "you" often becomes "ya/ye", some consonants get removed).

  • Pippin Took had a distinct Scottish lilt in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movies, which some fans try to replicate in fic, with varying levels of success. Bag Enders manages it fairly well most of the time and parodies it on one occasion, when Pippin starts speaking in a Glaswegian dialect to annoy the others;
    Pippin, now wearing a string vest for no good reason, said to the world in general, "Tha'ala'ti'mrsh'weebasser."
    There was a moment of complete confusion.
    "What did he say? Was that English?" asked Legolas.
    "Glaswegian. Haven't you heard the story?"
    "Ah'm'invennnorglasweginansoaham."
    "Yeeees..." said Aragorn, "He's not exactly the inventor. Perpetrator possibly. Centuries ago he tried to teach the old South Farthing dialect to some guys in a pub in south west Scotland..."
    "That's nothing like South Farthing dialect," argued Sam.
    "I did say this was in the pub."
  • A Boy, a Girl and a Dog: The Leithian Script: As a The Silmarillion fanfic, each tribe of Men and Elves have their own slang, ranging from the Valinorean Noldor's arcaic speech to the informal language used by human tribes. Differences between and within languages are often remarked, discussed (and sometimes mocked by some unpleasant characters):
    Noldor Captain: [rueful] ""I'm betting that's not much use for firewood, and it's mighty unhandy for a dinner knife" — [Haleth's] opinion of swords."
    Teler Maid: [curious] "Did she really say it like that?"
    Noldor Captain: [shaking his head] "No. I can't manage a Brethil accent properly at all."
  • The Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic Assumptions and the Word All features Suzanne the Vampire Slayer, who has grand mal cerebral palsy. All of Suzanne's dialog is spelled phonetically, given the character's speech limitations.
    Suzanne: (about to smack another Slayer who declared an injured comrade "useless" because of her injury) "Schay hyooschlesh haagn, hyoo fukken bhesch! Ah dayr hyoo! Ah duhubble dayr hyoo! Schay hyooschlesh jusch hwonn moah tiyem!"

  • Some, but not all, writers of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fanfiction will give Augustus Gloop (as well as his parents and relatives) a thick German accent with v's instead of w's, z's or s's instead of th's, and sometimes writing words like "stop" and "spot" as "schtop" and "schpot".
  • Child of the Storm:
  • In a lot of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers fan fiction, Monterey Jack's Crocodile Hunter-style (yet preceding Crocodile Hunter) Australian accent, as heard by Americans, is written almost phonetically, sometimes appearing to be exaggerated. It often goes something like this:
    Monterey Jack: Croikey, Gedget-luv! Remoinds me o' th' toime when...

  • The author of Decks Fall Everyone Dies has chosen to write out Joey's accent whenever he is speaking or when any of the other characters are imitating him.
  • In A.A. Pessimal's Discworld adventure Strandpiel, a girl brought up in Ankh-Morpork to a mother from Rimwards Howondaland, who in normal circumstances speaks with an Ankh-Morporkian accent, realises in some circumstances, speaking like her mother is inevitable.
    "Howondalandian bush mechete." she explained, pulling it partway from its scabbard. "We use these et home for all kinds of things. Stubborn bush. Chopping wood. Clearing a peth, if you're trekking in the deep jungle bush."... she frowned. She was starting to pronounce words like path as peth. Her r's were getting distinctly rhotic, too. Her iccent – accent - and even her intonation had changed too, as if under a weight of unspoken expectations from the other girls.
  • Doing It Right This Time: Mari's occasional lapses into broad Scouse when she's angry or excited are rendered in this fashion to convey the fact the other characters can't understand what she's saying either, even if they speak fluent English.
  • Dusk to Dawn series:
    • In Batman: Anarchy for All, there is Hugo Strange's thick Austrian accent, which replaces his W's with V's, Th's with Z's, and hard C's with K's.
    • In Batman: Melody for a Mockingbird, the Scarecrow is a Mississippi-born Southern-Fried Genius who says "Ah's" instead of long I's, and often leaves off the G's in "-ing." It makes his Techno Babble almost indecipherable.

  • Despite being an avatar of (or perhaps simply being) Hastur in Fate/Gag Order, Mickey Dugan talks exactly as he does in his comics. The commentary for the strip he appears in even has a primer for how to write Mickey's dialogue such as substituting "Your" with "Yer" only to assure the reader that they can do what they like if they try because the Yellow Kid's accent was often written inconsistently anyway.
  • In Funeral for a Flash, Doralla Kon, a woman from a parallel dimension, has a very noticeable lisp.
    "You are all zee Flash zis world has now, Wallee."
  • FURTHERFELL: Sans' canon Brooklyn accent becoming thicker in Drama! Romance! Bloodshed! is conveyed by his dialogue incorporating more slang from and mimicking the phonetics of the accent more often.
    Sans: [frustrated with Hare's lack of violence] fuck it! the audience ain't even entertained anymore. y' ain't hurtin' a soul! noble, sure, but also pretty freakin' borin'. so we're gonna spice this up. y' wanna go to hotlands, huh? y' want passage to the mtt resort. pro'lly so y' can go an' take out king hal 9000 or whateva. well howsabout this. y' can have the prize... if y' can pick it outta my cold, dead dust. and if ya don't have the heart to hurt me? well then i'm gonna give the audience a helluva show.
  • Expect this to pop up a lot in Hetalia fanfiction – the renditions of the more well-known accents (e.g Scottish, French, German) can rapidly turn your brain to mush trying to decipher it. Also justified; the characters are walking stereotypes.
  • Notable examples in the Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Outcast include:
    • Sweden/ Berwald's gruff manner of speaking is faithfully transcribed (with all the dropped vowels and truncated words):
      "I d'nno if I should g't too close, F'nland. It's risky 'enough w'th jus' you."
    • The same is true for France/ Francis' heavy french accent:
      "France does not get distracted by ze beautiful ladies and gentlemen of zis world, 'e coexists with zem in perfect 'armony."
  • More often than not, Homestuck fanfic makes sure to show you Dave's Texan drawl and Sollux's lisp.

  • More Fragging Paperwork: Optimus' first attempt at writing Ironhide's condolence letter derails because he accidentally types out the subject matter's name in Ironhide's Southern accent.
    'I regret to inform you that Ahnharrd perished in the course of carrying out his duty to the Autobot cause...'
  • My Immortal, the infamous Harry Potter fanfic, sometimes looks like this is what it's going for, though with the general schizophrenic spelling it can be awfully hard to tell.
  • In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanwork, many authors will utterly butcher Applejack's Ozark accent.
  • Kalash93, an author of many My Little Pony: Friendship fanfics, likes to do this in his stories.

  • In The Octonauts fanfic Junior Officers, the Vegimals' language is sometimes rendered like this.
    Tunip: Shellydo gabadazu?Translation
  • Oversaturated World: As seen in the first chapter of Oversatuation, Neutrals, Applejack's speech is written with one:
    Ah'm wearin' shorts under mah skirt.

  • The Palaververse: For the Scottish corvids, they have an accent, such as "Yea", “Och, no,” (Oh, no), oot (out)
  • Power Rangers Cosmic Defenders writes Lethnock with what is intended as a Scottish brogue, due to the character in the source material being a shout out to the Lock Ness Monster.

  • Raised by Jägers: As a Girl Genius fic, all the Jaegers have very thick accents. While it's not obvious in the text, living in Mechanicsburg and spending all her time around Jaegers has given Agatha a rather noticeable accent compared to canon. It's especially noticeable when she's mad, and yells "Hoy!" to get someone's attention. She also uses Mamma Gkika's "what the dumboozle" once.
  • In Ranma ½ fanfic The Grand Tour, Ranma's speech is written in coarse English. Writer Drunkengronard took it to abrupt and ridiculous levels in subsequent stories. In Walkabout:
    "I see I ain't t' only one lookin' fer info. I'm guessin' ya got some Ju Jutsu an' one'r two schools of Karate?"
  • In the Land of Oz fic The Road Built in Hope, Dorothy has a mild accent due to her Kansas heritage and her youthfulness.

  • In The Second Try, Shinji's efforts to learn and speak German produce funny results. Asuka chuckles when he tells her "Ich leibe Sie" instead of "Ich liebe dich" (meaning "I love you")
  • In The Second Try sequel Aki-chan's Life, Asuka explains to her daughter that some Germans have a very strong, barely intelligible accent. When Aki compares them with her father, Shinji tries and fails to prove his German is getting better.
    Asuka: And in some parts, the people speak so funny that you can barely understand them, even if you know German!
    Aki: Like Papa?
    Shinji: Hey! "Mein Deutsch bekommt sehr gut!"
    Asuka and Aki snicker as Shinji fumes
    Author: He's trying to say that his "German is (getting) pretty good", but that should have been "Mein Deutsch ist sehr gut" or "...wird immer besser").
  • Shinji Ikari speaks Japanese just fine in Shinji And Warhammer 40 K; however, he speaks English with an Ork (growly Cockney) accent. Misato comments that unlike most Japanese English-speakers, Shinji could be mistaken for coming from England.... just from very rough parts of England.
  • When it comes to Star Trek: The Original Series fanfics (including the alternate timeline movies), it's rare to find an author who doesn't write Chekov's Russian accent in to some degree. Scotty gets this treatment on a fairly regular basis too. McCoy is less common, but not unheard of.
  • The Story Shuffle series: From Applejack, for her southern accent:
    • Story Shuffle: "Yo, Jimbo!":
      "Shoot, Twi, you know Ah ain't comfortable with all these titles an' such. Last thing Ah want is t' trouble some stallion who's puttin' his life back t'gether."
    • Story Shuffle 2: Double Masters: From "How Not to Luau":
      After a few moments of silence, Dash actually noticed. "What?"
      "We're gonna need t' have a talk soon."
      "I didn't even do anything!"
      Applejack nodded. "Yeah, that's part o' th' talk."

  • In TDWT Reducks Redux and Love Ain't Easy, It's Ezzy (both Total Drama fanfics by The Kobold Necromancer), Ezekiel's thick Canadian accent is written phonetically. This is very noticeable, as Ezekiel is the author's favorite character and gets a lot of focus in both fics. Furthermore, since The Kobold Necromancer is a Fandom VIP in the Total Drama fandom, a lot of fans began to follow Kobold's example and write Ezekiel's accent phonetically in their own fan works.
  • In the That's What Bein' A Friend Is About series, this is used to convey Ninten's southern accent to the audience.
    “I heard ya like blowin’ things up.”
    “I snuck in and stole somethin’ for ya.”
  • In Transformers: Animated fandom, Blitzwing gets the short end of the stick, with half his consonants reduced to 'v' and 'z'.
  • Twillight Sparkle's awesome adventure:
    • Applejack uses one once:"Nowa whera isa Twillighta? Sha was neva lad befoa." said Applejack in her accent I'm not using again because it sounds silly.
    • All griphons also have them (Gratuitous German), and unlike Applejack's accent, they're actually constantly applied throughout the story.
    • Luna also has one which is consistently used: Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe with No Indoor Voice.

  • A plot point in A Very Kara Christmas: Linda Lee had some sort of odd, unidentifiable accent when she arrived at the Midvale Orphanage, but she dropped it within a couple of weeks. This, coupled with other weird quirks, led her roomates to wonder if she might be a spy which needed to be watched over.
  • In Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse, Adventurer Archaeologist Penelope laFloo hails from Frauce, a French-themed kingdom in the East Blue, and is commented to have an extremely thick "French" accent. The text attempts to convey this by applying various inflections taken from online French pronunciation guides — dropping the letter g from word endings, spelling "the" and "this" as "ze" and "zis", dropping the letter h when it starts a word, and so forth.

  • Thankfully averted in The Beatles fantasy With Strings Attached, where the author uses only a light touch to make the four sound Liverpudlian (which is a notoriously difficult accent to reproduce on paper). However, played for some ironic effect in the sequel, The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, when different outworlders have different weird accents that are visually depicted—and where people are always commenting on the four as having weird accents. (At one point they're referred to as "those four guys with the funny accents.")
    • Though at the Border Crossroads Inn, when Folse asks Terb if he can remember anything unusual about George and John, and Terb remarks that they have weird accents, Folse dismisses this with "So does everyone."

    Films — Live-Action 
  • At one point in Blazing Saddles, Sheriff Bart reads aloud a note from Lili Von Shtupp (whose Verbal Tic is speaking with an Elmuh Fudd inflection) asking him to "meet [her] in [her] Dwessing Woom," suggesting the note is written like that.
  • The Japanese subbed version of Borat, the titular character's dialogue is translated in this way, using the aforementioned katagoto for simulating his lack of domain in English. (or Japanese in this case.)
  • While this trope is obviously not applicable to most live-action films, it was used quite commonly in the silent film era. Audiences could not hear characters talk so accents were conveyed through title cards.
    • The Chechahcos does this with Pierre, the Francophone Canadian Mook. "Meester Steele, he hire me to keel you."
    • In The Italian, the lead character's Italian accent is awkwardly rendered via title cards. "I must get-a-de-milk or my babee is die."
    • In Napoléon (1927), the intertitle explains that Napoléon Bonaparte pronounced his name "Nap-eye-ony" because of his Corsican accent.
    • Piccadilly: More plot-relevant than most, as Jim's line "it’ll bring no luck to 'im as finds it" reveals that Jim, who is ethnically Chinese, is not an immigrant but a native-born Londoner.
  • Hot Shots! Part Deux does this with an Iraqi warning button labelled "Halarm".

    Literature 

Authors with multiple examples:

  • Isaac Asimov:
    • The Foundation Trilogy's "The Encyclopedists": Lord Dorwin's Elmuh Fudd Syndwome is rendered as accurately as it can be in a textual format, with a number of letter substitutions causing "misspellings".
      Lord Dorwin said: "Mahvelous. Twuly mahvelous. You ah not, by chance, intewested in ahchaeology, ah you, Hahdin?"
    • "I Just Make Them Up, See!": This poem is written with a few of the words spelled the way they would sound if you read them aloud rather than using proper English, such as "feel o'" rather than "feeling of" or "go 'way" instead of "go away". The accent is included to help the reader know how to follow the rhythm and rhyme.
    • "It's Such a Beautiful Day": In order to demonstrate certain aspects of dialect, certain words are misspelled to imply their pronunciation. The teacher says "vee-ick-ulls" to emphasize that "vehicles" is not pronounced with an 'h' sound. Richard tells Dr Sloane about the "aut'm'bile" instead of the "automobile". The dialect is emphasized due to the way the vocalizer supposedly strips character and individuality from the voices of the students as they learn a "mass-average accent and intonation".
    • "Liar! (1941)": Several slurred words appear, minor examples of dialogue spelling being modified to demonstrate character speech.
      "B' seein' ye!"
    • ''Profession": George's eight-year-old nickname, "Jaw-jee", is a phonetic spelling of the typical "Georgie".
    • The Return of the Black Widowers: In the foreword, Harlan Ellison included a number of phonetically spelled words, such as "howzabout", "gardyloo", and "c'mon".
  • Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg's The Positronic Man: In chapter two, Little Miss mispronounces "algae" as "algy".
  • T.C. Boyle
    • In The Tortilla Curtain, whenever Cándido tries to speak English it comes out like "No espik engliss." And one of the book sections is titled "El Tenksgeevee" as in Thanksgiving, rather than the more correct and fan-prefered "El Tenksgivi" which would preserve Spanish spelling rather than putting that poor word in the anglicization blender.
    • The short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is written in a very heavy Southern drawl. It is much harder to read aloud than it looks, especially if you're a student teacher with a New England accent trying to read it aloud to a class of kids.
  • John Buchan in his Richard Hannay novels, beginning with The Thirty-Nine Steps, depicts Scottish accents phonetically, and with sufficient faithfulness that several different accents can be distinguished between the various characters Hannay meets on his Scottish adventure in Mr. Standfast. Lampshaded and averted with Jack Godstow in The Island of Sheep; Hannay-the-narrator says he's not going to attempt to represent Jack's Cotswold accent, and paraphrases everything he says instead of reporting it as direct speech.
  • Used frequently by William S. Burroughs.
    • "No glot. Clom Fliday." From Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine
    • "Meester" to imitate a Mexican accent in The Soft Machine.
  • Agatha Christie:
    • Her representations of the "uneducated adenoidal speech" of the British lower class makes some of her books very difficult to understand.
    • Christie also did this when rendering American accents. Murder on the Orient Express features an "Amurrican" character who is going to "Parrus".
  • Dickens loved this trope and used stereotypical accents of his time. Sam Weller, Dickens's first Ensemble Dark Horse character, speaks with a nineteenth-century Cockney accent that has all his Vs replaced by Ws, and vice-versa. (Even the most extreme modern Cockney accents have lost this tendency.) This becomes a plot point when he's put on trial and there is some confusion on how he spells his name. In Great Expectations, a minor Jewish character speaks with a lithp, which was considered a stereotypically Jewish trait at the time.
  • Greer Gilman's fantasy novels contain meticulous transcriptions of Yorkshire and other dialects along with plays on older and newer meanings of English words.
  • James Herriot's tales of life as a vet in the pre-WWII Yorkshire Dales — starting with All Creatures Great and Small are thickly seasoned with this trope. Interestingly, as with the Dickens example above, there's evidence that the Herriot stories may have helped to preserve records of a dialect that's very different today.
  • The works of Zora Neal Hurston, most notably Their Eyes Were Watching God, frequently feature speech written in a thick, southern, African-American dialect (especially that spoken by Nanny) that received mixed reactions from African-American critics. By contrast, Hurston's narration is told in prim and proper prose.
  • Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories (and several British authors) sometimes feature American tourists going to "Yurrup".

  • Rudyard Kipling:
    • He 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.
    • Kipling's Soldiers Three, featuring Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd - an Irishman, a Cockney and a Yorkshireman. The Mulvaney stories in particular can be a bit of a chore to read.
    • The Irish Father Victor in Kim, speaks only with the occasional "ye" or "o'", and in the same novel Kim's English changes after he begins to attend a British school.
    • Indian characters often speak English brokenly with a partly phonetically rendered accent, when these same characters switch to their native Hindi, this is rendered as a slightly archaic but grammatically and orthographically flawless English.
    • The German Muller in "In the Rukh" speaks English in an atrociously exaggerated accent, but is likewise rendered in the same archaic English when speaking Hindi.
  • Stephen King does this in his books whenever there is a character with a thick Maine accent. Judd from Pet Sematary for example (not to mention the title itself).
  • H. P. Lovecraft loved to do this; most notably in The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow Over Innsmouth with lower-class and non-white characters.
    • Neil Gaiman's short story "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" in Smoke and Mirrors parodies the New England accent found in Lovecraft stories.
  • P. G. Wodehouse did it too, sometimes getting it completely wrong (e.g. a New Yorker who pronounces long A's "oi").

Individual works:

  • Any American novel that involves soldiers from the UK and a Lieutenant. Whenever one of the British say that officer's rank, it's always 'Leftenant'. Tom Clancy is extremely fond of this, and Call of Duty had Price say this once (subtitles say 'Leftenant').
    • The Goon Show had an American character called "Lootenant Hern-Hern"; he may have appeared in just one episode, but it was printed.
    • Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy contains an American character, Lt Padfield, who is usually referred to as "The Loot," referring to the different pronunciation of "lieutenant" in American English.

  • 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die: The entry for Dracula renders Bela Lugosi's lines as "Cheeldren of the naight, leesten to thaim" and "I nevair dreenk vine!".

  • In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain uses a variety of written accents, most notably with Jim, who is a slave and has nearly all his dialogue misspelt to reflect his lack of education, common in works depicting African Americans at the time. There's a Note from Ed. at the beginning:
    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.
  • Introduced jarringly at the end of Nina Revoyr's Age of Dreaming, in which the narrator is an elderly Japanese man who was once a silent film star.
  • Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel (which is like a cross between William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez) 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.
  • In The Age of the Pussyfoot, de man out to kill de protagonist speaks like dis. Assumed to be German, but revealed to be Martian instead. The thin atmosphere caused the Martians to lose the higher frequencies.
  • In Almost Night, Alex's pirate accent and John Doe's cowboy accent. Lampshaded when Jaspike is told to kill John Doe since there is already a guy with an accent in the story.

  • Patrick Dennis does this for pages and pages and pages in Auntie Mame, with a wide selection of different accents. Joisey goil, Southern belle or Cockney orphan, he will drill it into your head that these people talk funny until the misplaced consonants and mangled vowels swim in front of your protesting eyes.

  • The Baby-Sitters Club:
    • Used quite a bit - and much mocked in fandom - from the Australian family the Hobarts, to Jessie's French ballet teacher, to Logan's Kentucky accent, to his brother's "allergy dialect".
    • And in the Super Special where they go to camp, and one girl has a pronounced lisp.
  • In Barber Black Sheep, Kittie's mother Birdie, who lives in the slums of London, has her speech depicted this way, as are a few words when spoken by Kittie. This is presumably intended to demonstrate the differences between Kittie, who grew up very poor, and Oliver, her Love Interest, who grew up in a middle-class household.
  • In The Baroque Cycle
    • Rufus MacIan, a Scottish nobleman whose accent is as impenetrable to English-speaking readers as it is to to the English-speaking characters who talk with him. An extremely polite character is eventually forced, against all propriety, to bluntly tell him that he's not technically speaking English and needs to make himself more clear. Author Neal Stephenson impishly assures readers in his afterword that his Scottish ancestors are surely rolling over in their graves due to his intentionally cartoonish use of the trope.
    • Certain German and Irish characters will also have written accents, but only when they are speaking English; at all other times the Translation Convention is in effect.
  • 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.
  • The Bridge by Iain Banks has a Scots warrior speaking in broad Scottish.

  • The oldest example in English comes from The Canterbury Tales, in which Geoffrey Chaucer renders the different regional dialects of Middle English phonetically in a way that clearly differs from the main body of the poem (written in his own London dialect). This is particularly pronounced in "The Reeve's Tale", in which he phonetically renders aspects both of the Reeve's own Norfolk accent (particularly using "ik" for the first-person singular pronoun, as distinguished from Chaucer's London/Southern "ich" and Northern "i") and of the Northern accents of two of the story's central characters (students at Cambridge, who have different vowels and use a lot of strange hard "k"s where Chaucer normally has "ch"s, and do weird things like say "has" instead of "hath" and use "them" instead of "hem").
  • In the Chalet School books by Elinor M Brent-Dyer, a lot of working-class British characters talk like this. In the earlier books, Biddy O'Ryan talks like this as well, in a 'rich creamy Kerry brogue' ('sleep' is written as 'slape', 'never' is written as 'niver' and so on), much to the annoyance of Irish readers, and the McDonald sisters in Highland Twins talk in a phonetically rendered Highland accent which, frankly, makes their dialogue hard to read. This was cut in the abridged version.
  • In the Chaos Walking series, the books are told in the first person point of view. Chapters with Todd's viewpoint reflect his drawl (and possibly his illiteracy).
  • Anthony Burgess plays with this at some length in A Clockwork Orange in which the central protagonist, Alex, speaks a heavily Russian-influenced patois in which individual words are Anglicised ( "horrorshow", meaning "excellent" or "very good", is derived from a Russian word normally transliterated as Hara-sho, for example ) and the whole dialect is generically referred to as "nadsat", a Russian suffix used in forming numbers in the same way you would use "-teen" in English, although Russians don't call teenagers that. Much of the book is written in Nadsat, which flows much better than you might expect. The film tones the dialect down, but keeps some of it.
  • John Kennedy Toole took great care to transcribe the accents of his New Orleans characters as perfectly as possible in A Confederacy of Dunces. Ooo-wee!
  • In The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, Doctor Sigma's dialogue writes out his comedy Austrian accent, with Vs standing in for Ws, Ds for THs, and so on.
  • Amalia Ivanovna/Ludwigovna from Crime and Punishment had one.

  • In Dear Enemy, the sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs, Sallie McBride does this in a few of her letters to her friend Judy. This is actually justified — what she's describing is conversations that the Irish Sallie has with the Scottish Dr. Robin MacRae, in which they both playfully use their ancestral accents. She writes out the dialogue phonetically so Judy (and the reader) can see what she means.

  • Discworld:
    • The Nac Mac Feegle are a whole race of tiny Violent Glaswegians who speak in a phonetic Scottish accent.
    • 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)
    • Igorth 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.
    • Misspelled words with the correct phonetics is also sometimes used in these when a character is obviously repeating the word from hearing it but not properly learning it, such as Nanny Ogg saying "swarray" in Maskerade, or Granny Weatherwax's "Jograffy." Or, as with Tiffany's vocabulary, if they'd learned the word from a dictionary that didn't include pronuncuations.
    • Trolls, whether because their rock bodies can't finesse the letters or because they're not very intelligent as a rule, are usually depicted with an inability to pronounce "th" sounds, usually replacing them with "d" (e.g. saying "der", "dis" and "dat" instead of "the", "this" and "that".)
  • 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.
  • Dispatches: If someone isn’t speaking in standard English, author Michael Herr will usually record it.
    • Note the subtle difference between Day Tripper (black) and Mayhew (white):
      Day Tripper heard the deep sliding whistle of the other shells first. “That ain’ no outgoin’,” he said, and we ran for a short trench a few yards away.
      “That ain’t outgoing,” Mayhew said.
    • Herr meets a soldier from Texas who says Herr should write a story about him “‘Cause I’m so fuckin’ good, ’n’ that ain’t no shit neither. Got me one hunnert ’n’ fifty se’en gooks kilt. ’N’ fifty caribou.”
    • Karsten Prager was a German reporter who spoke English with a Brooklyn accent. Herr asked him how this happened, and Prager replied “Well, I got dis tuhriffic eah fuh langwidjis.”
  • Done pretty risibly throughout Dracula. A particularly egregious example is the old Yorkshireman; one edition 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.
  • S. M. Stirling does this frequently. In the Domination series, parsing Draka speech patterns (a sort of mutated 18th-century American Southern, influenced by Afrikaans and filled with loanwords from languages of the peoples they've enslaved over the centuries) takes some getting used to. In one of the books, a character describes the accent as "a German trying to sound like Scarlet O'Hara."
  • Drawing A Blank has all of the Scots characters starting this way, or lapsing into it when Carlton fails to comprehend them, but are otherwise just noted to have an accent and then spelling normally.

  • Emily the Strange: Stranger and Stranger: AS Emily writes in her diary, she makes fun of Venus Fang Fang for her accent by writing exactly what she heard. She has a lot of fun when VFF says "enema" for enemy.
  • The 1912 serial novel Eve's Other Children by Lucille Van Slyke — a Fair for Its Day depiction of Syrian immigrant women and their children living in New York and working as lace-makers — had most of them speaking Ameer'can En'leesch but ees nod too hod t'onde'stan once you get used to it. Van Slyke shows they are Eloquent in My Native Tongue by writing the Syrian dialogue in classically beautiful English, with thee and thou.

  • Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M. Banks, 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: his sections are essentially a diary, in which he explains that the thought-interpreter he's using doesn't agree with his unusual brain pattern. It doesn't help that the computer pulls out oddities like spelling "have" as "1/2" and the overall inconsistency in the spelling.
  • In Eric Knight's The Flying Yorkshireman almost all of the UK characters speak like this, resulting in scenes like a duke telling a local lad "And ye'll be heving a hawlf dozen bairns or so, wi'out doubt." or the King saying "Sit right down with me and the Queen and hev a coop o' tea - it's that chilly and raw out today."
  • The original novel of Forrest Gump is written in Forrest's Southern dialect.
  • Freak the Mighty gives us one line of this from a local bully, then renders the rest of his speech normally, with a remark that it's bad enough transcribing his words without having to copy how he says them.
  • The title character in Gene Stratton-Porter's Freckles speaks with the author's idea of an Irish accent. This is particularly interesting since he was born in Chicago and grew up in a Chicago orphanage. Not only does he have an inherited accent, he has an inherited upper-class accent: "Somewhere before accident and poverty there had been an ancestor who used cultivated English, even with an accent."

  • Almost all the characters in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath speak in some variant of a rural-American accent: the Joads' eldest daughter's name is given as "Rose of Sharon" in narrative, but always rendered as "Rosasharn" when spoken. Steinbeck even hangs a lampshade on his characters' awareness of their own, and others', speech:
    "I knowed you wasn't Oklahomy folks. You talk queer kinda—that ain't no blame, you understan'."
    "Ever'body says words different," said Ivy. "Arkansas folks says 'em different, and Oklahomy folks says 'em different. And we seen a lady from Massachusetts, an' she said 'em differentest of all. Couldn' hardly make out what she was sayin'."
  • The Great Gatsby: Meyer Wolfsheim, the Greedy Jew gangster, uses G's instead of K sounds, so that "Oxford" becomes "Oggsford." This emphasizes his low-class origins outside of proper Gentile society.
  • Malakai Makaisson of Gotrek & Felix, a dwarf, speaks in this way. Dwarves in that setting generally speak as humans do or at least very close, but Makaisson is said to be using an uncommon regional dialect.

  • Harry Potter:
    • Hagrid's West Country accent, to the point of sometimes being unintelligible to Americans. Go here to translate anything into Hagrid speak.
    • Fleur Delacour's French accent is a case that isn't always consistent. Sometimes, she says "think," and sometimes, she says "theenk."note  The argument could be made that Fleur's accent actually diminishes as the series progresses.
    • Viktor Krum's Bulgarian accentnote  is used to teach the reader how to pronounce Hermione's name.
    • The Cockney-accented Knight Bus operators Stan Shunpike and Ernie Prang.
      "Can’t do nuffink underwater. Ere, you did flag us down, dincha? Stuck out your wand 'and, dincha?"
      — Stan Shunpike, as written out in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
    • Professor Quirrell's stutter: "P-P-Potter," stammered Professor Quirrell, grasping Harry's hand, "c-can't t-tell you how p-pleased I am to meet you." In fact, any time a character stutters, it's written out thus.
    • Curiously but thankfully averted for the Scottish inhabitants of Hogsmeade.
  • Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar series:
    • Take a Thief has Skif doing this through most of the book — to the point that the dialogue is incomprehensible.
    • Mags speaks this way throughout the first three books of the Collegium Chronicles. Fortunately for the reader, it looks like he's finally learned standard Valdemaran pronunciation by Book Four.
    • A minor example in the second Mage Winds book — Elspeth leaves a note for Darkwind, but since she's not fully fluent in Tayledras she spells everything the way it sounds to her.
  • His Dark Materials: For certain words pronounced by the Gyptians and Lyra. The most frequently used one is "en't" for ain't.
  • 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!" Interestingly enough, "Ratz" in Russian would still be pronounced as "Rats" due to pronunciation rules.

  • In The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky renders Lebedev's speech phonetically to indicate when he's mispronouncing French words.
  • Into The Broken Lands: The town of Gateway has a fast, slurred local accent. In sections from an outsider's point of view, it's written phonetically when they struggle to understand what's being said.

  • Jane Eyre has the country woman who offers runaway Jane a penny speaking in Yorkshire dialect but you can still understand her. Charlotte Bronte and her brother Branwell wrote dozens of books, short stories and articles as children and teens where they would try to approximate various dialects. Branwell even worked out a special dialect for the toy soldiers on whom the entire huge Glasstown saga was based.
  • Novelists often use a Funetik Aksent to indicate something about character. Thomas Hardy does this in Jude the Obscure, and for most readers it backfires. He lets us know that Richard Phillotson really doesn’t understand his wife Sue Bridehead (and by silent contrast shows her cousin Jude’s closeness to her) by having Phillotson mispronounce her name as “Soo” (book iv, ch. 3). This doesn’t work for all those readers who normally pronounce that name thus.

  • In Paul Theroux's The Kingdom by the Sea, an account of a 1982 trip around the coast of Britain, accents are often illustrated phonetically as a way of mocking the locals.

  • An example of Funetik Aksent spelling by a native speaker of a dialect - the beginning of the most well-know poem in Lancashire dialect, by cotton-worker Samuel Laycock (1826-1893). Note for instance the three different "thou"s in the first stanza and the two spellings of "come", reflecting different pronunciations according to stress and context:
    Th'art welcome, little bonny brid,
    But shouldn't ha' come just when tha did;
    Toimes are bad.
    We're short o' pobbies for eawr Joe,
    But that, of course, tha didn't know,
    Did ta, lad?
    -
    Aw've often yeard mi feyther tell,
    'At when aw coom i'th' world misel'
    Trade wur slack;
    And neaw it's hard wark pooin' throo—
    But aw munno fear thee,—iv aw do
    Tha'll go back.note 
  • Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming has James Bond and Felix Leiter overhear a conversation between two people in Harlem. The long argument 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.
  • Older Than Feudalism: In Aristophanes's play Lysistrata, the Athenians speak normally, but the Spartans have their Doric Greek accent spelled out phonetically. Modern translators may render the Doric (a Greek redneck accent) as Irish, Scottish, or Southern, or may omit it.

  • From MARZENA: „Vat bedoolt yay fünetik aksent?! Ik spreak me very hroot Englisch!” A great many characters of the story are not native English speakers, so you get some small mishaps every once in a while. Most prominent examples are Livia and the TAR Kernel. Also note the usage of quotation marks where the author makes use of French, Dutch and German quotation marks to denote accent tags (although French Quotation marks can also denote Russian accent tag).I
  • 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.
  • George MacDonald Fraser's McAuslan, to the point where it includes a glossary of Glasgow dialect for the benefit of American readers, and is discussed in the "Intramaduction".
  • In the Modesty Blaise novels, Willie Garvin's Cockney accent is rendered with occasional phonetic touches like dropped aitches, but not a full attempt to depict the accent. When Dinah mimics his accent in A Taste for Death, it does get a full on funetik aksent ("thousand" spelled as "thahsend", etc.), either to show that she's overdoing it or perhaps to let the reader know that this is what Willie really 'sounds' like.
  • The Robert A. Heinlein book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
    • The narration is written entirely in Manny's Russian-English patois, with much new slang and even an alternate syntax.
    • Additionally, Mannie lampshades his own use of the trope when relating his visit to the American South - he uses it heavily on the first line of dialogue, then apologizes because he knows it's distracting, and promises he won't do it again. This allows Heinlein to put the accent into the reader's mind, but avoids the distraction that it can cause, and further illustrates Mannie's Culture Shock.
  • The Moorchild features toned down but clearly Scottish dialect, being set in Scotland.
  • Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime: In "Red Christmas," the Russian spies replace their "s"'s with "z"'s and "w"'s with "v"'s while speaking English.
  • Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South is primarily set Oop North, and the main characters (who hail from Cornwall) meet many people there who speak with thick northern accents, written phonetically.
  • Number Seven Queer Street: Author Margery Lawrence utilizes this trope frequently to emphasize the foreign nature or uneducated status of psychic detective Miles Pennoyer's clients and acquaintances. (Pennoyer and his English friends are written with neutral accents and proper spelling.) Examples include:
    • The Case of Ella McLeod: When Ella gets worked up, her already heavy Scottish accent grows stronger:
      "Och, sir, wud ye do it?" In her excitement she was growing more and more Scotch. "But mind ye this—ask for yerself, sir, not for me! Say ye've found the dog hurrt on the moors, and gi'en to me to look after for ye—or till his owner's found! I ken fine his lorrdship 'ull do anythin' ye ask—but it's different for me. I dursn't ask her leddyship for myself."
    • The Case of the White Snake: Pennoyer interviews several London natives while on the trail of a mysterious young orphan's parentage, noting their "rich and fruity Cockney accent":
      "Naow, this the the gent'man, Jenny—name of Gratton, mister. Missis Gratton—and don't you get thinkin' he's a wrong 'un or after anything he shouldn't, see? I wouldn't 'a' spoken to 'im if I 'adn't known 'e was all right... Gawn naow, Lizzie—tell the gent what you know about the kid in the photygraph I showed you. You knew 'er, you said."
      "Yerse. 'S a wop kid," said the child called Lizzie promptly. "Come dahn 'ere wiv its muvver on'y abaht a munce before the big smash... Come dahn wiv a bunch of uvver wops, cos they'd been busted aht o' their 'omes, an' a munce later—wham! They was killed, every one of 'em."
    • The Case of the Young Man with the Scar: Played Straight and Discussed with Francine's cultured French-Canadian accent and Jacques' thick French-Canadian drawl:
      • In Francine's case:
        "All thees stuff about spirits, and magic, and ghosts... it ees plain rubbish. Onlee fairy-tales fit for children."
      • And Jacques:
        "Eh bien, messieurs! So you are come—my leetle girl-friend lead you all right, eh? It was time—eh, yes, it was time. Come, come—you come down and sit close, eh? It will not wake our boy—my leetle charge... He sleep well—and I, Jacques Lorraine, have much to tell you."
    • The Case of the Leannabh Sidhe: Patrick's Irish nurse Kathleen is described with a "soft brogue":
      "Och, I'll tell, I'll tell!" She sobbed. "And mebbe it'll bring the peace to me sowl at last that it hasn't known for years an' years. I'll tell—and be able to face the praste again widout blushin' at the black shame of the thing I've been hidin' all these years..."

  • Thierry Delasix from Paradise Rot has one, via the French Caribbean, although it doesn't seem to effect him being understood much.
  • In The Paradoxes of Mr Pond by G. K. Chesterton, the story "When Doctors Agree" is set in Glasgow. Most of the characters have their dialogue written normally (although they use Scottish phrasing, such as "You'll not say..." instead of "You wouldn't say..."), but Dr Campbell is an exception. The narration explains:
    One of the many ways in which Dr. Campbell seemed to have emerged from an elder and perhaps honester world was the fact that he not only spoke with a Scottish accent but he spoke Scottish. His speech will, therefore, be rendered here with difficulty and in doubt and trembling.
  • Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: Sally Slickskin, who speaks in a Southern American accent, with "y'all" and "Ah", for example, in Princesses on the Lonely Isle:
    "Just... Ah hope Big Daddy didn't get himself hurt none. I worry for the big lug."
  • In Push by Sapphire, the whole story is like this, but it is implied in the story that she is writing this herself. Precious is illiterate at the beginning, so it makes sense. The story begins with a narrative based on her speaking voice, so she says "I'm going to maff class" or "I ax my muver for money." Her actual writing is shown in later chapters, it just takes time to evolve.

  • The Railway Series has the Caledonian Twins Donald and Douglas, who speak with thick Scottish accents.
  • Toward the end of Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, a family of Tennessee mountain folk shows up (somewhat inexplicably) in Southern California just a few years after the Mexican War. They speak English in a "hillbilly" dialect, which Jackson renders by wildly misspelling almost every single word out of their mouths, making their speech difficult even for English-speaking readers to follow and comprehension for the Spanish-speaking characters in the novel (who know only a little English) all but impossible. Fortunately, one of the Tennesseeans can speak Spanish and acts as interpreter for both parties. But since Ramona is for the most part a monolingual novel with the odd Spanish phrase salted in, when the translator speaks English he does so in the hillbilly dialect, but when he speaks Spanish it comes out as perfect English - thus combining this trope with Translation Convention!
  • 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 accents from The West Country. The Hares have a Verbal Tic modeled after the stereotypical 19th/early 20th century British military 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 on paper). Also their names has been translated to stereotypical names from such places.
    • Most of the vermin don't have a recognisable regional accent, just generic poor grammar with a dash of Talk Like a Pirate, except for two in Salamandastron who are inexplicably Brummie.
    • Princess Kurda and her villainous family in Triss are Horny Vikings types, but have a quasi-Slavic accent that sounds like it's from Ruritania instead, peppered with "Yarr!"
    • Most characters from the Northlands have Scottish accents, except for Rockjaw Grang from The Long Patrol who has a distinctly Yorkshire one.
  • The Reynard Cycle: The rougher characters tend to say "Yer" and "Ya" instead of "Yes" and "You", and at one point Hirsent calls a squirrel a sqirrl.
  • Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban is written entirely in Riddley's dialect. It gets easier to read after you've been reading it for a while.
  • Parodied in Anthony C. Deane's poem "A Rustic Song":
    I talks in a wunnerful dialect
    That vew can hunderstand,
    'Tis Yorkshire-Zummerzet, I expect,
    With a dash o' the Oirish brand;
    Sometimes a bloomin' flower of speech
    I picks from Cockney spots,
    And when releegious truths I teach,
    Obsairve ma richt gude Scots!

  • Many of the servants and lower-class characters in The Secret Garden speak in a phonetic Yorkshire accent. Mary initially thinks it's a completely different language.
  • In Sheep's Clothing, Doc (the narrator) renders his own dialogue in perfectly spelled English, but most of the other characters in a "dialectized" form ("ya" for "you", and so forth) to show their regional accent. Wolf's dialogue is even heavier, but at no point does it become incomprehensible.
  • Manly Wade Wellman slips in some of this in his Silver John stories, all set in the (very) backwoods of Appalachia.
  • The Sound and the Fury is told by an idiot with a Funetik Aksent to match. The novel is split into four parts, the first three with a different character providing a first-person POV. The idiot is one of those three characters (with the others related to him in some way). Then the last part is third-person, sorta.
  • Starship Troopers:
    • When a battle goes horribly wrong, the commanders broadcast sauve qui peut ("let him save himself who can")—that is, the only objective is to get yourself and any living buddies back to an escape ship and get off the planet. Later on, a character (smart enough, but without much formal education) refers to the "sove-ki-poo".
    • On the first day of basic training, Sgt. Zim asks if anyone thinks they can beat him in a fight. Out of the ranks steps Breckinridge, three inches taller and wider in the shoulders. The following conversation takes place:
      Breckinridge,suh - and ah weigh two hundred and ten pounds an' theah ain't any of it 'slack-bellied'
      Any particular way you'd like to fight?
      Suh, you jus' pick youah own method of dyin'.
  • 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 favors "vw" for Chekov's 'nuclear wessels' accent, which is somewhat difficult to read.)
  • Alex Kilgour from the Sten series comes from a world colonized by Highland Scots and has a thick accent represented this way. Lampshaded when Sten gets a letter he's startled to realize is from Alex, but then faces the fact that even Kilgour wouldn't write with an accent.

  • Neil Munro's Tales of Para Handy often makes use of this trope, although with a lot of care given to properly depicting accents appropriate to the background of the characters. The narrator and Para Handy's middle-class employer are written as Standard Scottish English, while working class characters are written in colloquial Glaswegian and those from the Highlands and Isles, particularly Para Handy himself, have a notably distinct, Gaelicised accent.
  • In David Eddings's The Tamuli, one character speaks exclusively in a phonetically spelled and deeply hokey dialect — until it is revealed that he naturally speaks quite normally and is in fact practicing a variety of Obfuscating Stupidity.
  • To Kill a Mockingbird has some differences in pronunciation and word use to show not only characters' race and social class, but also the gap between children and adults — some speech patterns were okay for kids of Scout and Jem's background but would have to be dropped as they grew up — and what was appropriate in different situations. In one scene Scout and Jem go to Calpurnia's church with her and, on the way home, ask why she talked to the other black churchgoers in their own dialect when she "knows better." Calpurnia gives them a brief explanation of what we now call code-switching. Probably legions of readers who had no idea about this were made aware of its existence (and their own participation in it) by this book.
  • Trainspotting (and everything else by Irvine Welsh) uses this trope so extensively it take most people several chapters before they can fully understand anything. The extensive use of Scottish slang also complicates matters. While there are a few chapters narrated in standard English (from a third-person omniscient perspective), most are from a various first person points of view and written in that character's particular brand of thick Edinburgh Scottish.

  • The Uncle Remus stories are incredibly difficult on the first reading. Reading them out loud may help. A little. "Br'er" is "Brother", ok, but what's "bimeby"? note . However, this is as another example of a fairly accurate representation of an archaic accent; in this case, the mid-1800's Deep South

  • Avoided, with two exceptions, in the Village Tales series. The justified exceptions are Irish-born former England cricketer Brian "The Breener" Maguire, who makes his living now doing his "Plastic Paddy" turn on TMS and the lecture circuit (and with blatant self-parody); and local publican Mr Kellow down the Blue Boar, who has been playing up to the expectations of trippers and tourists for so long he's no longer capable of not sounding like a Wurzel. Other characters with regional accents are shown as such through grammatical construction and word choice.

  • 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.
  • Richard Adams's Watership Down:
    • Anytime a human speaks in the book, it's rendered in a phonetic rural Hampshire accent (the only exception is the doctor, presumably because he's educated or not local).
    • Kehaar the seagull is written with a very thick accent as well (combined with You No Take Candle), explained that as a bird he cannot properly speak the rabbits' language but can say enough to be somewhat understandable. It's meant to sound Scandinavian, as Adams based Kehaar off a Norwegian he had befriended earlier in his life.
  • Ms. Waloosh, the dance teacher from Wayside School seems to have an accent that is vaguely Eastern European. Particularly, she tends to pronounce her Ws as Vs. By the end of the chapter where she's featured, all of Mrs. Jewls's class starts talking like her.
  • Paul Quarrington's novel Whale Music has several characters' accents written phonetically:
    • Saxophonist Mooky Saunders speaks in a thick African-American Vernacular accent:
      "Shee-yut, when you gonna fawk that woman, Desmond?"
    • The guru Babboo Nass Fazoo speaks in a near-incomprehensible Indian accent, with a smattering of You No Take Candle:
      "I am gnawing where iss dis garl." (I know where this girl is).
      "Life is a powl of zoob." (Life is a bowl of soup).
    • Paul McCartney's thick Scouse accent is exaggerated:
      "This is Pewl McCartley spikking. We must evarcuate immidzatly this rheum!"
  • In Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie, the heavily Gaelic-inspired accent of the Hebrides is written phonetically, with normally voiced consonants changing to voiceless: "beer" becomes "peer". When the characters actually speak Gaelic, it's written using standard Gaelic spelling.
  • Woath it? Coarse Ah Am, Pet is a spoof memoir of Cheryl Cole ("Cheryl Kerl") rendered entirely (256 pages) in an exaggeration of her Geordie accent and dialect.
  • Joseph (and practically everyone else in Heathcliff's household, but the main offender is Joseph) of Wuthering Heights.

  • 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.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In the Blackadder episode "Chains", Percy reads a ransom letter in the kidnapper's unusual German accent (largely an English accent with certain consonants replaced), implying that the kidnapper writes with it.
    "Many, many...apple-ogies for the inconweenience."

    Music 
  • Nerdcore hip hop artist Baddd Spellah's name is a parody of how many hip hop artists combine this trope with Xtreme Kool Letterz for the way they spell their stage names, album titles, song names, liner notes, etc.
  • 2D and Murdoc of Gorillaz have occasional hints of this in interviews and their autobiography Rise of the Ogre. The song "Dare" is so named because of how guest vocalist Shaun Ryder pronounces "there" in the song.
  • The Iron Butterfly classic "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (supposedly the "stoner" pronunciation of "In the Garden of Eden").
  • Led Zeppelin: Their 1973 reggae song "D'yer Maker ("joor-maker")," which represents the lower-class British English pronunciation of "Jamaica," but probably had many Americans wondering why the song was named for someone who made dyes.

  • The Pearl Jam song "Breakerfall" is titled such because of the way Eddie Vedder sings "break her fall" in the chorus.
  • Scottish traditional musician Brian McNeill sings and writes his lyrics in Scots, which is written phonetically, rather than English (see Real Life below). For example, the opening lines for the title song of his 2009 album The Baltic tae Byzantium look like this:
    Well, my faither* was a sodger* frae* the parish o' Bonawe,
    Would fain have seen me listed in the gallant forty-twa*
  • Traditional African-American spiritual songs when transcribed for Western choirs, while usually not entirely written like this, usually have some of the variations written in to make the rhythms or emphasis 'scan' properly. Sounds very awkward if the rest of the song is sung in a completely different accent. The adaptation for the choir of Porgy and Bess can sound cringeworthy when sung by choirs for the same reason.
  • Thin Lizzy's name is a kind of inversion. It's a play on the Tin Lizzie character in The Dandy (herself named after a nickname for the Model-T Ford), but the joke is that in a stereotyped Irish accent, it would actually be pronounced as "T'in Lizzy".

    Pro Wrestling 
  • Many online posts about Dusty Rhodes will mimic his trademark lisp and other mannerisms, if you weel.
  • Played for Laughs, as "Stone Cold" Steve Austin would refer to Vince McMahon's hometown of Greenwich, CT (which is pronounced "Greh-Niche") as if it were pronounced "Green-witch".
  • WWE NXT's Realest Guys Enzo Amore and Colin Cassady have a thing for calling their opponents "sawft". It's their New York accent, sure, but they even insist on spelling it out as such. Unsurprisingly, "S! A! W! F! T!" is a fun enough sing-along for the crowd that they ended up turning face and then leveling up in badass.

    Roleplay 
  • Stetson MacLee does this in Darwin's Soldiers story Nietzsche's Soldiers 2.
  • In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, all of Dark Dragon's speech is written out with a strong Cockney accent, even his inner thoughts.
  • A natural part of attempting to write an accent on The Gungan Council, such as with Mao and Steph.
  • 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. Rein Bumgarner of v4 also has a notable German accent shown in his dialogue. Iris Landon of Evolution is also an example of this trope, speaking with a Southern accent that is always written out.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Deadlands uses this trope applied to the "Cowboy Accent" throughout, including in rule-text. Skills are named things like shootin' and ridin', the reader is addressed as "pardner", and so on.
  • Similarly, the Serenity RPG has everything in cowboy-speak. If possible, assets and flaws are named after actual lines from Firefly.
  • The character KNYFE in Sentinels of the Multiverse talks in a very, very heavy Scottish accent.
  • Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000:
    • The speech of Orcs and Orks are spelled to indicate a Cockney-like accent, representing their conceptual roots in British soccer hooligans. The names of their troops are misspelled partly due to this trope and partly due to Stylistic Suck: Boyz, Deffkoptas, Meks, etc.
    • Dawn of War gave a hilariously bad phonetic (and otherwise indecipherable) accent to the Chaos Cultists unit. It was so amusing amongst the Warhammer 40K fandom that it led to the creation of the fan-character/meme "Cultist-chan", a cute, bungling girl who uses the same absurd accent, which is of course rendered phonetically in her speech bubbles and "greentext" posts.

    Theatre 
  • The Dark of the Moon by Howard Richardson does this, too. Because it assumes that the actors are not from Appalachia, everything is done in phonetics. What's really annoying is that the lyrics in the script are written phonetically, while the unaccented words are written under the notes in the sheet music. Also, the "he" in "you ain't got no man to make you he bride" should probably be pronounced like "heh," but the way it is written, it should be pronounced "hee." Rednecks have terrible grammar as well as atrocious accents, apparently.
  • Hell-Bent Fer Heaven is set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. When it was performed on the stage it would have been simply people talking with hillbilly accents, but when it's read on the page the dialogue is near-incomprehensible. One character says the rain is causing the river to flood by saying "they must ha' been a reg'lar toad-strangler up the river last night. She's a-b'ilin' like a kittle o' fish!"
  • Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off is written mostly with exceptionally thick Scottish accents built in.
  • Durak McMackMack, a Tabletop RPG character in Of Dice and Men, is described in the script as having "a truly ludicrous Scottish accent," which is written out phonetically. A sample:
    Durak: Oi am a cleric of the moighty Dwarven gahd Moradin, which is hoo Oi was able tae affard this here lukshyOOrious an’ beyOO’ifully-appointed tabard.note 
  • The book and lyrics to Oklahoma! are rendered this way, including the song titles ("I Cain't Say No," "Pore Jud is Daid," etc.). Oscar Hammerstein loves this trope. See Carousel, South Pacific, Flower Drum Song, et al.
  • 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 (though he uses it occasionally later for especially blatant examples):
    THE MOTHER: How do you know that my son's name is Freddy, pray?
    THE FLOWER GIRL: Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y' de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel's flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f'them? [Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]
  • Seven Brides for Seven Brothers has the song titles "Bless Yore Beautiful Hide" and "Goin' Co'tin'".
  • The chorus of villagers in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer: "Oi tell you true which I've never done sir/Oi loike you as oi never lik'd none sir"
  • Alfred Jarry's "Ubu" plays have Ubu and his wife's peculiar accent written into the dialogue - an accent made up by the author. This has made translation of the texts tricky, to say nothing of placing the accent. The most famous example is that of "Ubu Roi"'s first word, 'merdre,' which is the French word for 'shit' with an added extra R.
  • All of August Wilson's plays are written in Southern black dialect. If you grew up in white suburbia, this takes some getting used to, especially since the syntax is all mixed up as well. It's one thing to hear it on Mtv, it's quite another to see it written.

    Video Games 
  • Arcanum: A stupid / "dumb dialogue"-using character's dialogue is written this way, with poor Virgil suffering the brunt of it as the player character mangles his name into Voigool, Virgul, and worse.
  • In The Bard's Tale, the Bard encounters a man named MacRath with a nigh indecipherable Scottish accent, in a game already filled with characters that have fairly thick regional British accents. MacRath's subtitles retain the phonetic spelling of his words, while everyone else's are spelled out properly.
    The Bard: You've got to help me here. I can't understand a bleedin' word he's saying. Is this even MacRath?
    Dugan: What do you mean? Of course that's MacRath.
    The Bard: Ask him a question.
    Dugan: Hello there, old friend. How are you gettin' along with this young scamp?
    MacRath: Och braw, Dugan, braw tae see ye an aw. Thes bonnie lad haur saved mah hide frae tha nuckelavee 'at some trosk released.note 
  • Bugsy is set in 1920s Chicago, and much of the dialogue and narration is written to reflect the appropriate accents. Even the cover calls it "An Advencha For Da [platform]", and the back cover includes: "If dis software is defective in any way please return to da guys at CRL for a nudder copy!"
  • 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.
  • Dare to Dream: The Bloody Stump is written as if he has a Scottish accent. Which is...unexpected, to say the least, for a talking tree in the depths of Hell.
  • In The Darkside Detective, members of the Plinkman family have an Oop North accent, rendered phonetically. Likewise, the Irish accent of the spectral Officer O'Hara character Officer Ghouley.
  • In Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, Tink's French accent is rendered phonetically.
  • In Final Fantasy VIII, this may account for Ultimecia's bizarre "Kursed SeeDs! You will not stop me from achieving Time Kompression!" speech patterns. May be a somewhat dubious way of making her sound "Russian". Or may be just Xtreme Kool Letterz.
  • In Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, Athena replaces all W's with V's in a vaguely Germanic accent. In Fire Emblem Heroes, she mishears "Order of Heroes" as "Odor of Heroes".
  • In Grand Theft Auto IV, Little Jacob speaks Rastafarian English and Real Badman uses Jamaican Patois. They're nearly unintelligible despite technically speaking the same language. Their dialogue is rendered phonetically in the subtitles too, rendering them almost useless for deciphering them. Niko Bellic (who is Serbian and hasn't been in Liberty City for long) understands so little of Badman's Patois that Jacob has to provide a translation.
  • A Highland Song takes place in Scotland, and has words spelled out phonetically, such as "mebbe," "cannae," and "couldnae."
  • In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Utopia has a slight country drawl, so she removes the "g" in words ending in "-ing" and sometimes addresses groups as "y'all", as shown in her dialogue.
  • Kingdom of Loathing parodies this with the Gnomes. Many of them replace every instance of "N" with "GN" (such as "Hello agaign, Advegnturer") which looks strange but, if read out loud, does not change the pronunciation at all (because the "G" in "GN" is silent).
  • Salvatore, the owner of the "Sinking Ships" minigame on Windfall Island in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, speaks with a mix of German and French, accent replacing all W's with V's and laughing like "honh honh honh".
  • Some of the characters in Quest for Glory have this: Most notably, the Hermit and Fred the Troll in the first game (the former 'aving all of 'is initial h's replaced with apostrophes, and the latter having a distinct pronunciation of "hide and go seek" that you have to mimic to convince him to move away from the entrance to his lair), and the castle guards in the fourth game (who, for example, pronounce "other side of the castle" as "odder side o' da castle.")
  • Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns has this. Westown residents have a very thick Texas drawl with stereotypical words and phrases thrown about, but some Tsuyukusa residents like Ginjiro also have a milder version as a localization choice. The result is that Westown sounds like Hollywood Texas, but Tsuyukusa sounds like actual Texas.
  • Super Mario Bros.
    • Chef Torte in Super Mario RPG speaks with some sort of Germanic accent. "Vatch zee CAKE!!"
    • Tape from Paper Mario: The Origami King speaks like a stereotypical Italian-American gangster, and it has an exaggerated Italian-American accent to match. It pronounces "that" as "dat", "girl" as "goil" and "hurts" as "hoits".
  • Team Fortress 2: The Heavy's Powerup Food is pronounced and spelled "Sandvich". Never "sandwich."
  • Them's Fightin' Herds: Certain characters have their respective accents written out this way in the text dialogue for Story Mode and the original Book of Lore.
    • Arizona is written with a Southern twang, along with all the other Cattlekind, which leads to a lot of truncated words like "champ'een."
    • Velvet is written speaking Sexy Scandinavian, resulting in a lot of "ze's" in the place of "the," among other things. Oddly enough, she's the only Reindeer with a speaking role who has this accent.
    • Pom is written with a Scottish accent, with words like "tae" written instead of "to".
  • In Time Fcuk, all the people that send "text messages" to you enunciate each letter individually.
  • The accented English used by the advisers and announcer in Total War: Shogun 2 can come across as this (a noteworthy example being "OUR MEN ARR RANNING FROM ZA BATTELFIELD! SHAMFUR DISPRAY!"), although units themselves speak entirely in Japanese. By the Fall of the Samurai expansion DLC, however, everyone is given this treatment with the exception of the Foreign Veterans.
  • In 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".

    Visual Novels 
  • In Double Homework, the German Mr. Adler has his w’s written as v’s and his th’s written as z’s.

    Webcomics 
  • Averted with the Adventures of Dr. McNinja 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.
  • The Adventures of Wiglaf and Mordred - Driver and Galen both speak with very heavy accents (Deep South and Russian, respectively). In Driver's case, it's shown in The Rescue arc (and Word of God) that she gets it from her father, who also has a noticeable southern accent.
  • All Over The House played this for laughs in a news report about regional accents on street signs; which were apparently intended to enhance 'local identity'.
  • Maria, Bjorn and Johan of Anders Loves Maria are from a rural, northern part of Sweden, so Rene Engstrom renders their dialect in English with a Lancashire-like funetik spelling.
  • Angels 2200: Kid talks, dreams and writes with a heavy French accent.

  • In Beware of Toddler, the titular Toddler's speech is rendered this way, with words containing "s" coming out as "sh", and some words being spelt like they're pronounced (ex. "juice" becomes "joos").
  • The Black Brick Road of O.Z.'s Bastille has this, replacing "w" with "v" and "th" with "d".
  • In Bloody Urban, Angelica speaks vvith a vvery thiick Яussian accent, vvhiich iis rendered like thiis.

  • Charby the Vampirate:
    • Tony speaks in 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.
    • This troll also has one.

  • Darths & Droids has fun with this
  • Dean & Nala + Vinny depicts Dean's thick Scottish brogue like this sometimes: "Ah think Ah'll poot you on a cracker and eat you up." And after getting a paper cut: "It's doon to the BONE! AAAAA" and "OMAGOD! Is it BAD? I'm afraid to LUKE! It hurts so bad!!".

  • EVIL does this with Kahn's cockney accent, as well as Professor Murderstein's German accent.

  • Foundation - The Psychohistorians: Two accents are added to this adaptation:
    • In this adaptation, Gaal Dornick has an English countryside drawl written into his speech bubbles that reflects the fact that he comes from a backwater planet.
    "Ah was hoping t' catch a glimpse o' Trantor. 'Tis muh first trip t' the capitol planet."Gaal Dornick's first lines.
    • In this adaptation, Lors Avakim and Linge Chen drop certain "oh" sounds, saying "cent'ry", "emp'ror", and "psychohist'ry".
  • In Friendship is Dragons, Applejack's player has a country accent to match Applejack's accent in the show. However, when she needs to play Sandbar, a character without an accent, she loses it, causing no end of confusion for Pinkie Pie's player.
    Pinkie's Player: WHAT IS YOUR REAL VOICE?!?!
    Applejack's Player: The truth is... I'll never tell.
    • The joke is taken even further with Twilight's Player being able to figure out who's playing Human!Applejack in the canon guest comic based off of My Little Pony: Equestria Girls simply because she speaks in a country accent.

  • In Phil and Kaja Foglio's Girl Genius, the Jägermonsters (monstrous-looking soldiers transformed by Mad Science) 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. Amusingly enough, the Jägers actually write in their Aksent, as is seen with Gil's ''Schmott Guy'' hat and Mama Gkika's ''Dollink''. Their onomatopoeia is even rendered in the same accent (Klep! Klep! Klep!).
    • When the first Heterodyne, whose descendants created the Jägers, is temporarily brought to the future he speaks in a similar but even thicker accent.
    • The novelization refers to the Jägers' accents as their "original Mechanicsburg accent" and notes that voice-activated clanks (and sometimes kitchen appliances) have a tendency to open fire on conversing with them.
  • 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. If you look closely at this strip you'll notice Red says "a what-er-what-iday" — if you've ever talked to a Scot, they have a hitch in their voice turning holiday to hool-iday. A British person would generally say 'holiDay' with emphasis on the "day" part.

  • Each of the trolls in Homestuck has a unique typing quirk that apparently mirrors how they actually speak: Kanaya Carefully Enunciates Every Word She Says; tAVROS, uHH, tENDS TO FALTER; Eridan has a kind of wwavvy soundin accent; Vriska tends to 8e really dramaaaaaaaatic; KARKAT IS ALWAYS RAGING AT SOMETHING; 2ollux 2peak2 with a lii2p; and so on. When Sollux got his fangs knocked out by accident, it cured his lisp... and subsequently his typing quirk.

  • 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?}

  • In The KA Mics Sven & Oli speak in a Scandahoovian accent. Fortunately they don't show up much.
  • Devils in Kill Six Billion Demons do this quite a bit. Although they're not bound by any particular Earth accent, Cio's emulates several quirks of the Yorkshire accent including dropping "the" from her speech and using "thee" and "tha" (with a fair bit of Scottish terms added), while Oscar approaches something akin to cockney or London east-end. When speaking amongst themselves, devils speak in what can best be described as "Extra British Nadsat". Angels, by comparison, seem to speak with no accent at all.
  • In Knights of Buena Vista, Walter gives Weselton an accent so thick that Mary's thoughts describe it as mangling French, Scottish, and German all at the same time. Adriana even asks what a "kwen" is, so Walter tones it down.

  • Lackadaisy has several examples: Viktor (Slovak), Aunt Nina (Irish) and the Savoys (Cajun). "Now he got no lag room bag dare."

  • 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!"
  • In Misfile garage owner Harry has the most appalling Cockney/Welsh fusion accent. Thankfully his appearances are rare.

  • Done intermittently in Nip and Tuck, for the character's "hillbilly/redneck" accents. The author mercifully spares us the use of this trope for long speeches.

  • 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.

  • Angus from The Pigs Ear speaks with a Scottish Funetik Aksent. This wouldn't be notable outside of Angus' species except that the author is himself Scottish, and he doesn't give any of the other characters such treatment, so one wonders exactly what the effect he was intending.
  • 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 (see above image). And a different set of phonetic spelling for characters who aren't Scottish putting on bad fake Scots accents.

  • Supernormal Step gives us May Dolingan, an Irish vampire "with an accent so strong you’d swear it was another language".

  • The Australian owners of the Jolly Swagman in The 503 speak in a strong bogan accent written as it sounds, with this even being lampshaded in Strip 70.
  • The Martians in Triquetra Cats "'ul gonna da'z be ohhzen else Miss Ushiro?, Borrrd'n iz ha Starport 3B y'un da eur gran' trip!" "if yoo'll ho ye, ay wur hactually deal'n wi d'lydy in front hay yeur! Ohz tiribly soz 'but dat but ohz clap d' ammust flecht teur d'lunaaar colonoys, baint fe sex os sa yaeur wonnot be yabble ta..."

    Web Original 
  • The tumblr-famous meme, "WHY U NO guy," is usually imagined by speaking in an accent.
  • The vaguely-European accent of Gru from Despicable Me is memed on by writing his pronounciation of "girls" as "gorls".
  • Quinsy in The Motley Two speaks like this - and, this being the Homestuck universe, also types this way.
  • "Pokemon Bloody Gory Evil Scary Version", an intentionally and hilariously bad Pokémon Creepypasta has the narrator speaking with one of these. Given her obsession with vodka, it appears that she's supposed to be Russian.
  • The animated comics era of SuperThings gave a child Professor K a German accent, switching S's in his speech with Z's. Him in the modern day, far more naturalized, lacks this trait.
  • Some tropes on This Very Wiki are this, such as Vampire Vords and The Ahnold.

  • Whateley Universe: There are multiple characters to which this is applied, and whether it's used or not is Depending on the Writer, as the series is a Shared Universe:
    • Elaine Ethel Nalley (a.k.a Loophole), a Georgia girl: as said in Secret of the Forger's List: Chapter 2 among other stories:
      "Ah'm not saying it's a bad idea, Becky," Elaine was saying to Rebecca. "It's just hard to film."
    • Charge, a French girl.
    • Alicia, a girl from the Bayou, as seen in Siblings and Savages: Chapter 2:
      "Be just fine if Dino-butt here would explain why he's usin' me as a hat!"
      "Stop that ya great scaly oaf! Ah am not a hat!"
  • A minor scandal emerged in 2020 when it was revealed over 20,000 articles of Scots Wikipedia was just written in English with a stereotypically Scottish accent by a teenager who had almost no knowledge of the language.
  • Downplayed in most of Zebra Corner's videos, because not much writing appears, but Mahk, the usual star of the videos who is somewhat inspired by Mark Wahlberg, has a heavy Bostonian accent, which is why his name is always written as Mahk instead of Mark in the videos and their descriptions.

    Western Animation 
  • In the Alvin and the Chipmunks episode "Dear Diary" the Chipettes' babysitter not only speaks with an accent but also writes that way, setting up the conflict in the plot.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door:
    • The numeric Code Names used by members of the KND are officially spelled "Numbuh [x]", reflecting the more lax pronunciation of the "-er" suffix one might expect from a child.
    • Invoked in the episode "Operation: C.H.O.C.O.L.A.T.E.". The villain of the episode, who happens to speak with a heavy German accent, writes it out phonetically in a menacing note.
      "I HEFF RETURNED."
  • Toki Wartooth and Skwisgaar Skwigelf of Metalocalypse, being from Norway and Sweden respectively have very definitive accents that carry over into when they text and write.
  • In the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Manic Mechanic," Rocko and Heffer attempt to repair their car looking through the manual to do so. Heffer starts reading it with a thick Eastern European accent, and Rocko tells him the accent is unnecessary, but Heffer says that is actually how the book is written. Rocko asks where the car was made, and Heffer attempts to read "Slovakia" in a normal-sounding voice.

    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.
  • The internet catchphrase "u wot m8" ("you what, mate", said as a Flat "What" of sorts), is meant to make fun of how British people talk, even though there is no accent in existence where "what" is spoken with an O. More accurately the phrase would be rendered "ya wut mite" assuming the accent being mocked is a Dick Van Dyke-style Londoner.
  • LOLspeak. Givz hedakes bi lokin at it. Er.. gives headaches by looking at it...
  • Any forum where people are quoting Tommy Wiseau. Oh hai, Mahk! Yuuah TERRING mi APAHT, Lisa!
  • Quoting Chris-chan from Sonichu is given this treatment. It eventually becomes illegible.
  • Chicago Tribune columnist Finley Peter Dunne's (1867-1936) "Mr. Dooley," a fictitious Irish bartender from County Roscommon, Ireland, was depicted as speaking this way:
    "Wanted: a good, active Dimmycrat, sthrong iv lung an' limb; must be... a sympathizer with th' crushed an' down throdden people but not be anny means hostile to vested inthrests; must advocate sthrikes, gover'mint be injunction, free silver, sound money, greenbacks, a single tax, a tariff f'r rivinoo, at home in Wall Street an' th' stock yards, in th' parlors of th' r-rich an' th' kitchens iv' the poor."note 
  • 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 using homonyms. So extreme that at first, and third glance, it looks like just a bunch of random words thrown together. It's actually an except from Rat Rotten Hut Howard L Chace's famous transcription of Little Red Riding Hood in 'Anguish Languish', which is an entire book full of such homophonous nonsense. 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 little girl who lived with her mother in a little cottage on the edge of a large, dark forest.
  • One player on the Champions Online presents all his posts in capital letters and phonetic spelling in the manner of, say, the Hulk as said poster is more or less always acting in character (or presenting said persona). It manages to be both a good example of why it's the trope can be good and bad. It's good because it is certainly very character-forming. It's bad because otherwise intelligent and sensible points can be lost when it takes 15 minutes to translate a short paragraph.
  • In the early 20th-century confectionery industry in England, some adverts featured cartoon Frenchmen snakily hissing, '‘Vill you try mine nougat?’

    Real Life 
  • When John F. Kennedy held his speech at the Berlin Wall, he had a note with the foreign language sentence "Ish bin ein Bearleener". Correct German spelling is "Ich bin ein Berliner". note 
  • Katakana is used by the Japanese to make foreign languages easier for them to read (and pronounce, just with a lack of 'L's), the foreign language in question being written in a phonetic Japanese accent. For example, 'chocolate cake' becomes 'chokorēto kēki" (which sounds more like 'chocoretoh cakey' written in English phonetics) but spelling varies with individuals' own pronunciation.note 
  • In Spanish, differences between dialects of the language can be either: variations in the grammar, dialects having unique words proper of them, or variations in the locations of the tonal syllable in a determined word. The latter one meaning that, when written down, the same word can have the tilde (graphical accent "´") on different syllables (or be missing in one of the writings) depending on the dialect.
  • American native-speakers of Spanish who went to school (that is, first learned to write) in English will sometimes write Spanish using English phonetics — the h vs. j thing, for instance. Left uncorrected, this can be a problem if they later take Spanish (foreign language) Class and lose points for spelling. Conversely, native Spanish speakers trying to use American slang will often spell the English words as if they are Spanish. ("Ja ja" on many message boards means "ha ha," as in laughter, but non-Hispanic readers might wonder why they are speaking German/Dutch/Swedish.)
  • Sarah Palin, like George W. Bush, pronounces "nuclear" as "noo-kyoo-lur" (the correct pronunciation can be awkward for people with certain accents; Jimmy Carter also used "nucular"). She pronounced it correctly in her acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention — but only because the text, as flashed to her on the teleprompters, included such lines as "build more new-clear plants" and "Terrorist states are seeking new-clear weapons".
  • As of 2014, Massachusetts has started programming advisory signs on the Mass Pike to read "USE YAH BLINKAH" to help encourage people to do something about the rampant lack of courtesy on the area's roads.
  • The Coen Brothers write all of their scripts in this manner, which makes things considerably easier for the actors to imagine how their dialogue sounds. For example, in Hail, Caesar!, a British director coaches his star with the line "Would that it were so simple." In the script, the line is written: "Would that ih-twuuuuuuuuh so simple."
  • The name of this B-24H Liberator. The innocent-looking name "Jamaica" is actually the phonetic rendering of "D'ya Make 'Er?" with strong sexual innuendo.
  • It's something of a Running Gag on the Internet and in other print media to render Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous quotes in this manner, both because it easily establishes where the line came from (e.g. any actor could have said "Get to the chopper!", but only Arnold said "GET TOO DA CHOPPA!"), and because it's funny. Even the trope for stock Schwarzenegger-esque characters uses it.
  • Scots (not to be confused with Scots Gaelic, which is a Celtic language related to Irish) is officially considered a separate language to English, to which it is closely related. (Some scholars still maintain it is merely a dialect of English as the border between "dialect" and "language" is fuzzy, but is recognised as a European "regional or minority language" and is often unintelligible to speakers o Inglis.) Since the Eighteenth Century, written Scots often used the "apologetic apostrophe" to indicate where the spoken word differed from Standard English spelling, as Scots was regarded by most as a low-prestige, "uneducated" dialect. In recent years there has been an organised effort to revive the language, and the standard has been to write Scots exactly as it sounds rather than rely on inconsistent English orthography. Therefore, written Scots looks exactly like it sounds. Indeed, many of the above examples could be considered to be accurately transcribed Scots rather than phonetically transcribed "bad" English.
  • In the later years of his life, Sean Connery was known for his unique Scottish accent with a tendency to say words that started with the letter "S" with a "sh-" sound, e.g. "self" pronounced as "shelf". There are websites which satirized this, including "Shubreddit" on Reddit and even a song, "Sean Connery: The Musical" on YouTube.


 
Feedback

Video Example(s):

Alternative Title(s): Phonetic Accent, Eye Dialect, Funny Accent

Top

50 Ways to Die in Minecraft

Farmer Brown, with his Texas accent, misspells "type" and kills everyone.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (4 votes)

Example of:

Main / FunetikAksent

Media sources:

Report