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@noah-cochran

I can’t have a conversation in that chaos. xD

*Glances around secretively* Oh, we’re whispering? XD Good idea though, but I think you got the wrong forum XD

However, one thing you might notice in my historical fiction is that I don’t mess with religion much. I’ll do it more in this series, but I don’t particularly want to turn these books into a conflict of religions (though there is a place for that).

I can see that. It’s a good idea and I like how you’re including several ethnicities/religions since it’ll add some interesting perspectives.

Same, I’ve kept it fairly limited so far since I just haven’t felt confident covering it.

Do you deal much with different accents in your books? I am clueless on how to go about this (though it isn’t necessary). For instance, I want my Arab character to have something of an accent, but I have no idea how I would describe it.

Ohhh, I do! I needed a common language but instead of making all seven tribes just speak one language I opted for having each speak a different one but there’s a mixed language that can be used to communicate with the others.

(I previously stated they were isolated up to a certain point and that means there was time for them to develop different languages so that would have meant that languages were destroyed or one took over and forced its language on all the others creating a big power imbalance, which wouldn’t fit either)

Essentially this language would have developed much as Afrikaans did, from a lot of different languages that need to communicate, creating a mixture of the biggest ones.

Anyway, that means all my characters have accents to all of the others XD There’s no such thing as no accent, there’s just an accent that’s not yours.

What I’m trying to get to there is that you have to be careful of giving one character an ‘exotic’ accent and all the others are imagined as speaking standard American English. (This goes double for anyone who isn’t from Europe.)

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give them an accent, since they probably do have one, but if they get a POV, they can mention how all the others have accents to them. And people from different regions of the same place can always have regional accents.

Now I’ve gone on that obligatory tangent, I’ll answer your question XD

I usually just describe accents like “They had a (region) accent.” That’s it. Just mention it once and it’s fine. I’m not a fan of writing it phonetically, I find it distracting and hard to read.

If you want to, you can add adjectives like strong, harsh, soft, flowing, etc. Once again, be careful with this so you don’t show one accent as the superior one and all the others as ugly/harsh/uncivilized. (I royally messed that up in my first and second drafts, I still have to go back and fix it, that’s why I mentioned it. XD)

On that note, I watched a great video on this a while ago. I’ll link it below. I remember it being fine, but there might be mild language.

It’s a subject I don’t see covered a lot in writing advice but it’s really cool! I love messing around with it since it can show a lot about the world, especially in fantasy.