Language, voice, and writing

[PancakeUniverse]

In my campaign, different languages and dialects have different characteristics. For example, a creature that primarily speaks or lives near creatures who speak a language have different accents when they speak Common. Here is some of what i have now:

-dwarvish speakers have Western (Texan) accents

-The gnomish language has a word for almost everything, so gnomes structure their sentence as if using those words. A single Gnomish word might translate to "situation in which one's clothes are eaten by moths".
ex:
Common speaker:Do you like swimming?

Gnomish speaker:Do you enjoy to partake in the action of swimming in a river or other large body of water?

-89.34% (I actually use that statistic) of goblins are illiterate, so most of their notes and letters are in the form of crude drawings.

I'd like to hear about any interesting ways you guys use voices, accents, or other mannerisms for different cultures or languages.

[Johnny Krillers]

I really like your idea on gnomes and I'm definitely gonna steal it when/if my players ever get to the gnomish settlements or any of the places where humans and gnomes co-habitate a city.

I personally also really like to add in gestures to my cultures that don't generally speak common as their first language, for example, my dwarves stroke their beards, scratch their heads or may pause with a look towards the ground when thinking, whereas wood elves point and make a lot of gestures while they talk, the size of which correlates to their speaking volume, small precise hand signs when they're quiet to large sweeping gestures if they're being loud, my gnomes have a lot of fidgeting and gesticulation, lots of hand waving and pointing at nothing as they talk a mile a minute, halflings head tilt, sway and lean a bunch, orcs and really anyone who glorify martial prowess and feats of battle have occasional sharp quick hand movements that they linger on, goblins like to mime out things and high elves are weird in their almost entire lack of body language and facial expression.

When it comes to speech, I occasionally have dwarves, elves or draconic speakers leave in a native word or two every now and then, a dwarf might then reiterate in common before continuing the sentence whereas the elves or draconics just leave you to use context clues if you don't ask. These kinda rely on how fluent in common a speaker is, the more they speak it and the less pronounced of an accent, the less they fall into it, unless they're a dragon, most dragons generally assume that you can't comprehend a lot of what they want to say anyway, unless they're one of the ones who takes on core race forms a lot, you've proven yourself in particular to them or they're just nice.

I like to do accents, but I'm not the best at holding onto them, so I try not to be exceptionally thick generally speaking with a few exceptions, my dwarves are a mix of Irish and Scottish, just because it's ingrained in my head, most of them are also very deep voiced, which they attribute to being formed from rock and metal, elves usually have a kind of airy, flowing way of speaking with the wood elves also having an Irish accent and the high elves just speaking slowly and with a hint of some accent that it feels like they're repressing.

These are all just kinda rules of thumb and the ones I had off the top of my head, and of course their are outliers and people who may act a bit differently within cultures or be from a different culture despite their race, I make it kinda overly complex.

[Fishyninja]

It is definitely an interesitng concept which really applies to real life when you start looking at slang, hand gestures and phrases of differing places. Hell look at how Enlgish has evolved an how Britsh and American English Differ.

I love the idea of one of the D&D races being like the Elcor from Mass Effect and having to vocalise what emotion they are feeling before thy speak due to their monotone voices.
It's interesting if you start adding local dialects into it all for example would you expect a mountain dwarf and a hill dwarf to sound exactly the same. What about Drow who have barely had any prolonged contact with the other races what language or form of communitcation would they use.

I could imagine a quite shrill speech (to act as a secondary echolocation to assist with their dark vision) and thus if they try to speak underneath a certain octave level they have difficulty etc.