A prime example is the way the Jagermonsters talk in Phil Foglio’s comic Girl Genius. Evocative of a German speaking English, but the Katzenjammer Kids were nearer to reality in that regard.
Another is what Peter Beagle in The Folk of the Air denominated “Castle Talk” – a sort of faux-Medieval English with lots of “thous” and “prithees.” (I can’t speak to whether SCAdians actually talk like that.)
And there are countless examples in SF where the author has an alien speak some dialect of English that bears no apparent relationship at all to any known dialect or any real-life foreigner’s attempt at the language, e.g., Jar-Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace.
Is there a generic term for such? Seems to me this is the sort of thing for which there ought to be an actual technical name in glossaries of literary terms and concepts.
“Stage dialect” is a standard theater arts term, but I dunno if it would cover SCA fake-speak or Jar Jar Binks (I doubt whether anything in the theater arts canon could account for Jar Jar Binks…)
Sid Caesar is doubletalk – lots of nonsense syllables, with the meaning coming through by the speaker’s actions rather than his words. Carl Reiner can doubletalk and sound French or German by the inflection.
But I’d go with “stage dialect” for an artificial way of speaking understandable words for comic effect.
Stage dialects aren’t always intended to be comic. “Comic dialect” is a reasonably common, specific, and easily understood phrase. Is it not technical sounding enough?
It is NOT a trick to be attempted by the novice writer. Extremely hard to do well, especially now (back in the 19th century, you had people like Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley, who was all in dialect. If you wanted to do that now, it just wouldn’t work.
I always figured that was just Marina Sirtis talking like she talks, not a “Betazoid” accent. (Deanna’s mother Lwaxana talks just like a middle-class white American.)
BTW, the Jagermonsters talk exactly like a race of warlike Martian babes in a story from Foglio’s Xxxenophile SF-sex anthology comix. (They live in underground caves – where the air is – and their males are small nonsentient animals whom the females keep as pets and use for sex at whim; makes for some psychologically interesting hijinx when a male astronaut from Earth shows up.)
Well, wiki is not always the best reference, but look at the last sentence of the Next Generation paragraph. It clearly says her accent was made up as a combination of Eastern European and Hebrew, but her own accent was English.
Upon revisiting my latest post, I realized I should have included a “PDF” warning in there, and that neither example of an invented dialect was “for comic effect.” So you may have to make do with a phrase like “comic invented dialect” or “invented comic dialect,” not to be confused with “comic-invented dialect” (dialect invented by a funny person) or “invented-comic dialect” (dialect of a manufactured comedian).
I always figured that was just Marina Sirtis talking like she talks, not a “Betazoid” accent. (Deanna’s mother Lwaxana talks just like a middle-class white American.)