As a relatively new player, one of the things I find myself struggling with is developing a dialect or a tone for my character's speech. It seems to me sometimes that modern terms and idioms can break immersion or are discouraged. Meanwhile, attempting to use an older dialect, what you would think of as coming from the Middle Ages or maybe an older English dialect, sometimes seem to make character speech stiff and unemotional and less natural (which is fine, if it suits the character).

So my question to players and DMs is what kind of dialect you think works best in Sanctuary or what I can do to make my character's speech better or more suitable to the setting. Thanks.

If I had to compare the dialect with a historical dialect, I would say it is probably nearest to the language of Johnathan Swift and his contemporaries, although Sanctuary has sort of developed its own kind of dialects.

In Upper, it's like...

"Say, stranger, how about lending me a hand with this cart? I don't know if I can get it all the way to Serena Tower alone."

Lower,

"Oi', I can' get this damned cart on an' o'er the bump o'er here. Mind given'er a tug'er two t'see if we can't straighten the little sunuvabitch out, eh bloke?" (Maybe a bit heavy accented, but things are cut off more. Too much, like this, can sometimes be overbearing and frustrating to read.)

In the sewers, it's like...

"Rest, yis for five shinies! Wheeee!" -Noogak Boogleman, goblin merchant

Then you've got the typical dwarf-Scottish voices, although these aren't required nor are they held to be particularly canon as far as I know. I do know that they are easily overdone, so be careful!

Elves don't really have a special "voice". They might use flowery language, since they're used to long words like Tel'Quissara.

Halforcs are voiced "Lika diz. Likez da shinies!" a lot, which is IMO far too common and quite frustrating. Half orcs don't have to be mentally retarded with 18-20 strength all the time, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

Gnomes tend to be excitable and love fancy words, but speak normally otherwise.

Halflings are lighthearted, not to be confused with infantile or overbearingly childish. They can also be very serious though, staunch nearly, as most halflings, canonically speaking, are lawful. Their pantheon reflects this (3 LGs, 2 NN, 1 LN).

Of course, Sanctuary is a town of ex slaves from a hodgepodge of different backgrounds, so voicing is going to be diverse.

Some EfU/Sanctuary only things, as you have probably noticed and hopefully others will add to. The reasons for the changes are usually because the old word is non-existant or far too uncommon in the Underdark for common folks to recognize them and thus are changed to their Underdark subsitute.

Today/Tonight=Todark (They'll be leaving todark.)

Day/Night=Dark (Fair Dark!)

Underdark=Dark (The Dark is a dangerous place, don't forget to take a towel.) This is occasionally put as 'Dark to represent the shortening.

Bull=Rothe (That's a load of rotheshit.)

Fox=Rat (He's a cunning rat, that one.) Not necessarily negative, although it still is typically.

Wood=Zurkh, Zurkhpulp, Zurkhwood (Gee, his arms are a carved like zurkh.)

Garem's post in pretty informative, to say the least.

My tip for you as a new player is to create a character you feel you can stick with for a longer time, and allow yourself to take on and learn from what happens to him in the server.

He could be a surfacer from some region you feel comfortable with, and as time goes by his vocabulary and accent would naturally be altered to fit into the community.

When this character ends, hopefully not too soon, you would already have your own opinion about dialects in Sanctuary.

But as Garem said, they are very different depending on where you are. Upper/Old Sanctuary has it's own, Lower and the Sewers have theirs and so on. These days the server is even more split up into districts, so it all depends very much on the players to create their own speech

If you can't find anything you like, you make it yourself. :)

I've developed a fairly expansive Underslang of my own that I've used with a couple characters that I always meant to post up at some point. If there's any interest, I might post it up later. Let me know.

I often find that specific speech quirks, such as dialects, impedments or maybe even a stutter can really help flesh out a character. Just try not to make it the main idea. Sometimes it can end up becoming more trouble that it's worth, and if the most interesting aspect of your character is the way he speaks, then you may seriously need to think of adding some more to your char's history/behaviour

Excellent post Garem.

But you all will always to have in mind that you also play with non English speakers like me.

And I know sometimes it breaks immersion. Sorry. :oops:

But imagine who was when I had two guys walking in Upper streets speaking french because I saw that happening. :shock:

Even harder ...

Accents can sometimes add flavor to the character who is using them, but I find them contrived. We use something akin to a cockney accent for Lower (as best as can be written in text) because of the class and economic status affiliated with the dialect which correlates to the difference in general wealth between Upper and Lower. I feel that simply typing what you're trying to say is fine enough, and you can use your imagination to concoct what Underdark Lower Sanctuary Escaped Slave Chondathan sounds like. It's like a translation; we have words in our language derived from our particular history, history which is not applicable in the Forgotten Realms. Cynical and stoic are good examples of words which have counterparts in meaning in other languages, but have nothing to do with Cynics or Stoics, but we use them anyhow because that's how we communicate. So yeah. Use accents if you want, but don't rely on them to characterize your PC, because they're sort of silly. I think that this general argument applies to the swear word argument that went on some time ago.