Can any SDopers recommend a reference and/or guide book which might help a writer “write” with an Italian or French accent, for example? Does such a resource exist?
I find such efforts to do accents cartoony, so if you’re writing serious fiction, I’d advise against it.
I agree - attempts at indicating an accent generally just strike me as ridiculous, and can usually be served better by setting the character up through description
as having a “French accent” or “Italian accent”, etc. Most people already have their ideas of what these accents sound like.
Honestly, if I picked up a book that strove to be serious fiction, and saw any passage in it that said “I will bring ze fish!”, I’d put it right back down.
I have read this advice, and I even agree! That is, if overdone. For example, I cannot understand the “Andy Capp” cartoon and, likewise, The Red Badge of Courage. There are more missing letters than printed letters! It’s an apostrophe catastrophe!
But, if used sparingly, it could be done right, IMHO. It’s like trying to find the right balance of decorations on your postage-stamp of a property come Xmas! Maybe it can’t be shown as examples in a book. Maybe I’m after audio tapes to hear the accent in my head, first? I saw a thread about this to help actors get the right “voice”…maybe I’ll go “window shopping” there, for starters! Well, I just hope I can find again what I recall seeing posted at Cafe!
Any other thoughts on this?
- Jinx
Another way of hinting at an accent is by adopting the slightly different speaking styles non-native English speakers seem to take on - the sparing use of contractions (I will bring the fish, as opposed to “I’ll bring the fish”), word order that more closely follows their own grammar than ours (“The fish I will bring”) etc.
One of the best things you might do is listen to someone with that accent. Maybe write what they say down, and examine it. The sentance construction is hard to figure out as a writer, but easy for a reader to recognize.
I’d agree not to try a funny book approach to accents, but I wonder if certain misspellings might not be helpful? If you can manage to misspell things the way a French or Italian person really would.
An easy example might be using Queen’s English spellings for when a Brit talks and American spellings for an American’s dialogue. I don’t think I’ve seen this approach, but if it can work without being distracting, why not?
If you can find a copy, read L. Sprague de Camp’s Science Fiction Writer’s Handbook. It’s excellent advice for people writing any sort of fiction. He tells you to lay off the heavy-handed transcription of accents. You can achieve your goal with appropriately and only occasionally awkward English and the odd misspelled word. Ninettenth century writing like that in Uncle Remus or Tom Dooley, which strives to reproduce the pronunciation of each and every word in the accent and dialect is way out of fashion. It’s tedious to read and “translate” in your head. Robert Heinlein could get away with Manny’s clipped “Loonie” speech in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but that’s because he was Heinlein.
I’d say to use variations of English used by the speaker; local terms, quirks, and so on, rather than phoenetic spelling. Reading The Life of Pi, written in the first person, you can clearly hear the Indian accent of the storyteller, even though the author doesn’t write “veddy much” in place of “very much” - it’s just somewhat flowery Indian English.
For a Frenchman speaking English, you could scatter some French words in here and there to signify an incomplete vocabulary on the part of the speaker, swearing in proper context (“Merde!”), or stereotypes of Francophone ESL such as “I am registered on the Straight Dope message board, no?” or “I am registered on the Straight Dope – how you say – the message board?” You can also have the speaker make random disparaging comments about the United States, like “You and your George Bush and McDonald and – how you say – SUV car, no?”
<totally OT>I have every word but the fifth of your sigline. Help! (I can’t resist a puzzle)</TOT>
Oh, I was hoping someone would actually try it.
There ought to be enough information to get that word. Even if you don’t think you’ve got enough clues, there are others in the code itself – which is part of the point.
Maybe if poor Jinx had posted in IMHO he would have gotten an actual answer to his reference question instead of opinions on style. 
My advice is to ignore the advice. If everyone followed peoples’ advice to not do something, we’d never have pioneers.
I’m not aware of any general references devoted to the topic. However, there are some good examples in literature that you can refer to, and even point to as precedents.
I suggest you read Faulkner and Clemens for excellent examples of Southern US accents in written works.
And there’s definitely no missing letters, right? There’s only one letter left among the unused that I can think of that would fit for the first and last letter of the word (assuming that it’s a standard English word); which leads me towards a word suitable to the puzzle as a whole, as it were, BUT short one letter, and I can’t seem to come up with another word that would fit. 
D’oh! I’m a dingbat. I never heard that version of the word before, but I Googled it and voila!
yay, I solved CalMeacham’s sig!
I read a book that had a couple of characters with phonetic accents, but the phonetic spellings were identical to dictionary pronunciations. I still haven’t figured that one out.
Oh, and I’ll have to agree with others in this thread that I find it extremely annoying to have to sound out words. Just tell me the person has an accent; I’ll do the rest.
Part of the art of fiction is to engage the reader to the point that he is “in” the book. Any jarring change of tone or other artifice that draws attention away from the story to the words themselves will quickly remove the reader from his state of suspension of disbelief. This is a no no. “Getting ze fish” can work if it is the constant state of dialog and is accurately done; however, it is far easier to miss the mark with this approach than with many of the other suggestions mentioned.