City Languages/Accents

Fyrren

It's been something I have wanted to see in Aetolia for the past 10 years now but never bothered putting the idea up before. I think it would add a lot of flavor to the game to have the option to speak in your city language and set an accent as an automatic prefix/suffix to says.

I know it is not an original concept since it is in a few other IRE games to my knowledge but it would be neat if anything.

Lin

Hell yes. I'll take one El'jaziran accent to go, please.

Satomi

I'd be interested in hearing a general list of what each accent would sound like in RL. (just a Bloodloch = X sort of thing would do for me :P)

Fyrren

Bloodloch sounds like a Russian accent.

Kelliara

Fyrren said:

Bloodloch Spinesreach sounds like a Russian accent.

Fixed that for you.

Kelliara

On a more serious note, I've always imagined that anyone could tell that Kelliara is Spirean the moment she speaks, regardless of what language she's speaking, simply because of her accent.

I totally agree that accents, and city languages/dialects should be a thing. And I've been sneakily, and steadily trying to create Spirean jargon over the course of my tenure as CL. Some of which has been adopted/adapted by others in the city, and others which have not.

I'd love to see this as a mechanical thing, that'd be awesome. My only concern is that it might become tiresome if every single thing Kelliara said looks like this "Looking irritated, Kelliara says in a thick Spirean accent, in troll, "I'm a huge grump, grr grr grr."

Zaila

I'd buy iterators that gave Zaila a Spirean and/or Djeirani accent for tells. 

Antehe

I'd say Spinesreach has a Russian accent, Enorian's something Greek or Arabic, Duiran's Gaelic, and Bloodloch's hissing screeches.



- To be more constructive, however, languages themselves would be interesting, though having cross-linguistic accents could become very muddled (like speaking Spanish with a German accent - try to envision how that would sound!).

Seir

Antehe said:

I'd say Spinesreach has a Russian accent, Enorian's something Greek or Arabic, Duiran's Gaelic, and Bloodloch's hissing screeches.

Duiran's gaelic, eh? While the Scotman is, well, Scottish. This is how I imagine Duirani to dish out smack talk now:

Pazradym

Finally a good reason to have Paz join a city

Rhyot

Related to this topic.... I'd love to see a config that allows you to set an action before your say, so you don't have to do it every time.

Reason being, Z has a half-facemask and I'd like to be able to use that as an rp thing when he talks.... but i'm too lazy to type out 'say (speaking from behind a mask) X' every damn time.

Satomi

@Antehe I just wanna say that I was disappointed when I saw Bloodloch's accent! Now I dunno what to think!! I kinda want to say German, though, but considering it's in the middle of a desert.. in a cave.. I wouldn't be surprised if it was closer to Turkish or Egyptian.

Aishia

I never liked the Gaelic thing for Duiran but I guess there's worse alternatives.

Seir

Aishia said:

I never liked the Gaelic thing for Duiran but I guess there's worse alternatives.

My complaint was that the "Runic" language was always just bastardized Anglo-Saxon script. Granted, I didn't mind Taoiseach as a CR6 title, but I'm much, much happier with Duiran's new CRs.

Jaymi

I don't think there should be city languages -unless- there was a way for people to learn it besides joining the city/being an ally to a city. I like that anyone can pick up just about any language right now, with like... the tiny exception of Yeleni, Ildreth, Azudim. I think if an entire city could stop people listening to what they say just by switching to their city language, then that's pretty uncool.

Kelliara

Jaymi said:

I don't think there should be city languages -unless- there was a way for people to learn it besides joining the city/being an ally to a city. I like that anyone can pick up just about any language right now, with like... the tiny exception of Yeleni, Ildreth, Azudim. I think if an entire city could stop people listening to what they say just by switching to their city language, then that's pretty uncool.

I feel like most of the city languages would be a derivative of Aetolian and the language of major influences anyway.

Like a Spirean language would end up, for example an aetolian-ankyrean bastardisation hybrid. So like part of the framework for understanding would be there anyway. I'd say make it so the language could be studied to a certain point but never outright mastered by anyone not in the city.

Enough that an Enorian listener might get the gist of what two Spirean are talking about but not know EXACTLY what is being said/miss certain complexities.

(Just using Spinesreach as an example)

Satomi

I thought we were just talking about accents. If we want to start throwing up city languages, just make it look like the output of MUTTER.

That said, I disagree with making the languages exclusive. While I may not be this skilled, Sato has mastered pretty much every known language to date except for one or two (because I just don't have access to learning them), it is a bit silly to think that she'd be unable to pick up language lingo.

Still... Mutter.

I just disagree with the way Achaea uses city languages. (especially the whole, you quit one city, join another, and completely lose all knowledge of the previous city language through the forces of... plot?)

Fezzix

Jaymi said:

I don't think there should be city languages -unless- there was a way for people to learn it besides joining the city/being an ally to a city. I like that anyone can pick up just about any language right now, with like... the tiny exception of Yeleni, Ildreth, Azudim. I think if an entire city could stop people listening to what they say just by switching to their city language, then that's pretty uncool.

Yeah. How am I supposed to spy on everyone with city languages?

Teani

Perhaps make it a command you use, like SAYACCENT and this triggers the line and possibly obscures a few words like the MUTTER command to those who don't have that.

Even if they are not completely new languages, but dialects of the specific region, it would be even more awesome if it depended on how long you had lived there. Say you move from Spinesreach to Duiran. You still speak with a Spirean accent. Then, as you stick around, listen more to the people in the region, you learn more and more, and eventually your SAYACCENT will switch over to the new one, because that's what you are accustomed to.

Perhaps the previous accent will be stored among languages, so that you can still understand it if you once knew it fluently.

Satomi

So.. instead of SPEAK (language) it'd be ACCENT (city/region/town/etc)

Zaila

Having city-specific actual languages wouldn't make a ton of sense largely because we all speak "Aetolian" already, so there would have to be some kind of tower-of-babel-esque event to really validate us to suddenly all speak different dialects of Aetolian.

So very few of our characters have backstories in which they were really raised in the cities they presently live (or even were members of initially), so for everyone to have an accent of the city they live in doesn't really make sense, either. A lot of our characters would more reasonably have "a trollish accent", "a mhunnish accent", "a kelki accent" or some variety within the racial spectrum.

I feel like what would make the most sense (were this to be a mechanical thing) would be for everyone to be able to pick one accent for their character to have (either a major city, a village or a race depending on their individual backstory) that they could choose to use or not. I really like @Teani 's idea of making it work like muttering - and of the idea of "if living long enough in a certain city, gain the option of that accent, too", but it seems a bit convoluted and even less likely to ever happen.

Kelliara

Oh. I dunno. Someone said city languages, and I was like...

Opinion.

I don't really care about the idea of city-languages too much. As for accents...well, let's be honest, we don't actually need accents. We can just add them to our everything with they say/mutter/whatever custom styles. Like "say (in a spirean accent) Blah blah blah."

We don't actually need a mechanical thing, just a small culture change to start using it.

Mechanical would be cool, though.

Teani

@Satomi, no, I didn't mean that you'd switch completely and it would come out with every sentence you speak. As @Kelliara said, that would soon become too heavy-handed. With a SAYACCENT command, people could choose when to add the filter to whatever language they are speaking at the time. 

Races already have languages, so I guess it would make sense add them as accents. It would sort of be comparable with coming from different countries. Like me having a faint Scandinavian accent speaking American English, for example. Regional dialect would be more like the difference between American and Aussie English, which is still the same language, just sounding different. Of I would have interacted more with Aussies when learning English, I would probably have been speaking Aussie English with a Scandinavian accent. 

I guess it would depend on were your focus lies in your RP. Is it your race or your current home? 

To make a game comparison, say you have a Troll that has lived in Duiran for the last few years (RP focus on home, not race). The Troll would be speaking Duiran Aetolian, because that's the Aetolian they are most used to hearing, from chatter in everyday life in the community and whatnot. 

You then move your Troll to Enorian, and slowly become assimilated with their way to speak. Eventually you will be speaking Enorian Aetolian, but spending time with your old friends in Duiran will be like speaking with your own family and friends again. It's familiar, (I always fall back to my old regional dialect when speaking with my dad, even though I don't like it)  meaning you retain the understanding of the dialect (no filter). 

Just a cool concept. Not saying it should be implemented, but it feels like it would be a natural thing. My two cents.