Accents and Fantasy

Why do all fantasy folk talk in English/British/Scottish?Irish/South Wales accents in fantasy? What do you think?

I personally imagine a character's voice very vividly (heh) when I write. How about you? What do your accents sound like?

Well, when it comes to fantasy literature, I have no idea what accents characters are talking in. Accents refer only to pronunciation. Of course, fantasy characters sometimes use words or phrases that sound slightly more antiquated, even Shakespearean, and many fantasy settings have kings and queens and knights, just like feudal Europe. Only, we're talking about fantasy literature written in English, and the go-to medieval English-speaking setting is the U.K. And thus, even though the fantasy characters would realistically not be speaking English or any other Earth-language at all, the variety of English approximated is English or British or Scottish, etc.

This explains the accents you get in the Lord of the Rings movies. Vocal trainers sort of blended the mix of accents into something different-ish, but at least to my American ears, all those accents sounded very much English/British/Scottish.

I also imagine my character's voices quite vividly when I write. In fact, if I can't "hear" my character's voice, I can't write that character. Not his or her point of view, not his or her actions, and certainly not his or her dialogue.

As for their accents... this is where it gets tricky. Because these characters of mine aren't actually speaking English--I'm translating for them, essentially. I'm developing their actual languages for cultural and naming purposes, and because of that, I know how they'd sound when speaking English. But that doesn't help the reader hear an accent, and I will forever be against doing phonemic (more commonly and incorrectly known as 'phonetic') transcription.

After a long while on stewing on this problem--the fact that the characters aren't speaking English, but that their dialogue and everything needs to be translated into English--my eventual solution became to develop new subdialects of English that capture crucial elements of the characters' native languages and linguistic cultures. The idea is to give the reader a feel that this is foreign, different, as well as to strengthen my own connection to the characters. Without frustrating the reader (ideally).

Developing real dialects of English isn't an easy business, though, especially not when these still have to be dialects that the reader is going to be able to understand. But to me, it's the best alternative to having a character speak English/British/Scottish just because it sounds proper or older or more fantasy-like. (I'm American, if you're curious.)

Tolkien, you know, wanted to write the entirety of The Lord of the Rings in Elvish. This, though, presented some readability issues.

You know, I've always wondered this too... I think it's because if they had an American or Aussie accent, no one would take them seriously (for some reason, maybe it sounds too contemporary?) and if they had any other kind of accent (French, German, Swahili, whatever) you'd be like, why are they speaking English? They're not in an English-speaking country...

For my part, although my characters are technically speaking another language, they either have Great British (?) accents or American accents, it depends on the tone and setting of the story. Only two of my characters have other accents, based on a language I'm working on, but they tend to hide them pretty well (they don't want to give themselves away. However when they get mad or upset it really comes out strong!)