2y ago

People in the 50s, 70s speak differently from now, why dont more authors or tv shows use fictional accents?

I think the Expanse and Cloud Atlas did it, are there any other good examples?

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It's harder for people to follow, subtitles don't help everyone, harder for the actors to get right and keep consistent, etc.
It's just easier to let the actors speak 'normally'.
- You can tweak things just a bit without getting unintelligible. Like Mad Max: Fury Road using chrome as an adjective. Firefly uses shiny a lot to mean good in general.
  
  Well, that's not an accent, that's vocabulary, and plenty of shows do it, often to bypass censors. See Farscape's frell, frack. It's done in video games too - for example, 2077 has a pretty rich vocab
- It's basically translation convention minus the overt indication that it's a translation.
  https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TranslationConvention
“A Clockwork Orange”, famously, was set in a post-Cold War setting where the West and Russia had grown close, and the who,s thing was written in a dialect that was part English and part Russian. But I agree with the other poster that in general it’s too much work.
The Expanse is quite good in this regard, they invented a whole Creole for the belters in the show.
A Creole is exactly what happen when people talk a language in isolation for several decades.
- A creole is what happens when several groups with different native languages are put together and have to communicate. If you have people speaking the same native language in isolation you will eventually get a distinct dialect of the parent language, not a creole.
  
  I thought that was pidgen so I looked it up if anyone is curious:
  What is the difference between pidgin and creole? In a nutshell, pidgins are learned as a second language in order to facilitate communication, while creoles are spoken as first languages. Creoles have more extensive vocabularies than pidgin languages and more complex grammatical structures.
  
  You are right. I did not knew the difference but it make even more sense this way.
Firefly has some language quirks, not even mentioning the fact that they swear in mandarin all the time.
Well, Frasier is making a comeback
- This doesn't seem to really answer OP's question, think you may have misread second half of title.
I seem to recall for some episodes Boy Meets World did it.
In the novel I'm writing this occurs. Someone from 2004 is transported to a planet in the year 240,000. She learns the language, but she can't quite get the dialect down because humans have evolved different facial/vocal muscles by this point.
Obviously it's in writing so I can get away with not having to explicitly define the accent. 😅

17 comments