Dialectal Compensation in Roleplaying

Roleplaying

As I’ve reiterated quite often on this site, I’m an avid roleplayer. I enjoy World of Warcraft immensely — the raiding, the camaraderie with friends and fellow raiders, the exploration of new worlds and cultures and conflicts — but I am an innately creative individual. And one of the ways that I find outlet for these creative tendencies is through roleplaying a number of very unique characters each with her own personality, story, and idiosyncrasies.

Playing a variety of characters¹ can be overwhelming at time. Each exhibits traits that can be unique to that one girl while sharing traits that can be found in another. For example, Rahel Isera’duna, a former Sister of Elune who is still mourning the deaths of her friends, family, mate, and adopted daughter following the destruction of Zin-Azshari some twelve thousand years ago, sometimes has bouts of melancholy that mimic the periodic depression that assaults Teca e’Veritas, a Vindicator trained in the Holy arts by her mentor K’ure, the naaru who both gave the draenei the interdimensional ship the Oshu’gun and piloted it. However, the two couldn’t be any more different: Rahel is a cantankerous bitch who delights in tormenting her so-called friends and companions, picking fights, and drinking excessively²; Teca fancies herself as a cultural and linguistic enthusiast, having spent the last couple of months on Azeroth researching the oft-villainized murlocs while trying to rediscover who and what she is.

These kinds of characteristics make each of my girls unique in my eyes, but sometimes present challenges in roleplaying them as separate individuals.

One way that helps me to distinguish one character from the other is how each speaks. Not only does each girl have a different pattern of speaking, but some have adopted mannerisms that become apparent when they speak or have accents that I can use to directly identify and quickly adapt to that personality. For example, Csilla Kovács, the young and exuberant priestess who grew up on a vineyard in Elwynn Forest, speaks in what most likely should be a lackadaisical drawl, having been adapted from the speaking patterns of one of my coworkers. However, her enthusiasm and youth often results in her words coming out in a torrent of latter-teenage babble, which is directly at odds with what a friend once called a Highlands’ accent. On the other hand, the orc shaman “Silent” Julcsa Breakspear has a very dignified and deliberate way of speaking — when she chooses to speak.³ These unique characteristics allow me to slip into character much more easily, since I can link each character to a specific way of speaking.

I was thinking about this topic this afternoon as I created a character on the Scarlet Crusade US roleplaying server. As I told my friends last night, it would be a crime for me to have any character on a server without there being a single priestess among the ones found there. So, I rerolled a character who I had lamented that I had never had the opportunity to explore a lot in the past: Irenke, Spirit Woman of a small tribe of trolls found in the Hinterlands. In creating this character, I had imagined a strong, independent woman who was well-versed in the customs of her people. She was also a very sensual individual, a full-figured, curvaceous troll who was immediately at odds with the model for the troll female in-game.⁴ Her personality was created almost exclusively from the confident and almost overtly sexual dance that the female trolls possess. However, I wanted to further distinguish this character from my other troll characters⁵ by the way she spoke.

In World of Warcraft, many of the trolls exhibit patterns of speaking that are reminiscent of the Jamaican patois. However, because I enjoy research and have a voracious appetite in learning, when I first imagined this character I took the opportunity to learn more about the dialect that influenced this manner of speaking. It helped, too, that I was friends at the time with a gentleman whose family was originally from Jamaica and had been fighting to lose that particular way of speaking for years. My repeated questions and note-taking probably set back his efforts a decade or so, but he was pretty understanding at the time.

When I rerolled Irenke yesterday, I found my old notes⁶ from that period of time and started reviewing them. You see, when I first try to imagine the way that a particular character speaks, I often carefully list ways that they differ from my own normally adopted patterns of speaking. For example, in creating the character of Hajnal Guthhrafn, the dwarf who decided to leave Ironforge and grow up with her nature-loving relatives at Aerie Peak, I deliberately decided to distinguish this dwarf from others by having her adopt an Irish accent as opposed to the commonly portrayed Scottish accent. And in doing so, I did some research and wrote down some phrases, words, and even ways that sentences are structured to help me understand how this differed not only from a Scottish accent but also my own normal way of speaking. In the weeks that followed after finally rolling this character — a process that usually occurs only after I do extensive research on the race of the character to better compose a character background that ties in with the currently established timeline of the Warcraft universe — I referred to those notes extensively, until I felt pretty confident that I was going to be consistent in how Hajnal was speaking in each encounter.

Mind you, these notes are also wonderful for when I put aside a character for a period of time⁷ and want to return to her but am not too confident that I’m accurately roleplaying the character that as she was originally envisioned.

And while I doubt that many people go into this kind of effort in creating characters to roleplay, I thought that it was a pretty interesting way of uniquely identifying each character in such a way as to easily assume that role. Furthermore, as I previously noted, I’m very fond of learning for the sake of learning and enjoy the research that goes into each character, whether it’s learning more about the race of that character, the region she is from, her dialect, her profession, or even the real-world references that helped inspire the World of Warcraft equivalents.

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