Young Writers Society

Im writing a story about shapeshifters who can change into dogs. They live underground in modern times in a city called Bane. The capital is Wonderlust. My city is quite peacefull. Anyways, I want my characters from Wonderlust to have an accent ( a made up one). What kind of accent? Any ideas for what it could sound like? I have no idea.

Oh, and my story takes place in America underneath Kansas city.

do you want it to be something related to the shape shifting? Think of what sort of sounds dogs make and use it to replace some normal sound. Like woof, you could take the oof sound and try throwing it around until it sounds natural. Adding a particular swear word can add to the sense of accent.
that’s my two c worth

Before suggesting what kind of accent, I've to ask: Is it necessary? Accents show us the origin of one's place, and that kind of importance or influence is needed to brush of the assumption that the use of accent is to make the characters speak fancy. Perhaps they're not used to English, and when they speak English they have accent. Whatever it is, the accent needs to have a story behind it.

Also, do the shape-shifters confined to turning to dogs? If so, you can imagine how a dog supposedly speak English. Dogs have different kind of mouth structure than us; as far as I know, their mouth movements aren't as versatile as ours. So perhaps they shorten words, like instead of 'foreign', they say 'freign'. Or they make words simpler, like instead of 'eating', they say 'ea'ing' so that they don't have to pronounce the 't'. Or they use 'r' a lot, so its 'trrenacious' instead of 'tenacious'.

The most important thing to know is that, accent is shown through with dialogues, and before focusing on accent, you need to make sure the dialogue is strong. At the end, the meaning of the dialogue needs to be the main priority, and if the accent stops from a good delivery of the dialogue, there's no harm to remove it entirely.

Why even have an accent?

Phonetic accents are a pain to read and often end up poorly handled, making linguists everywhere cringe. They also have an unfortunate tendency to mirror discriminated against accents, which can create problems with how respectful the story is.

You can indicate an accent in text and describe it within the prose, then leave the dialogue as is past maybe very small phonetic indicators, such as dropping d's and g's at the end of words. But otherwise, accents are often not worth it.