The Worth of Viktor Krum: More on accents

I’ve written on Viktor’s accent and how it looks in the written form in “Viktor is not dumb!” but my statements about it have left me perplexed and wondering if I researched the Bulgarian accent and how to write it enough to say I have an “informed” opinion. So I’ve decided to rectify that. To do this, I’m going to identify a few areas that need examination: what makes up the Bulgarian accent, how to write a Bulgarian accent and whether J.K. Rowling followed the rules of writing one, and when it detracts to write out an accent.

What makes up the Bulgarian accent?

What a tough question that is. Well, part of the answer lies in the question that I’ve been vexed with, which is: how come there are things that supposedly make up the Bulgarian accent that aren’t in the accents of native Bulgarian speakers (at least the ones that I’ve heard)?

While looking up “Bulgarian accent” on Google, I came across a preview of a book which was written to instruct people on how to speak various accents, including Bulgarian. The book stated that the sound of “w” doesn’t exist in the Bulgarian language, and that the sound of “v” was the substitute in the accent. This is how Viktor’s accent was represented in Goblet of Fire and Deathly Hallows.

But a few days ago, I listened to a video of Stanislav Ianevski, a native Bulgarian, talking at a convention:

and not at any point did I hear him say “w”-words such as “we” or “went” like “ve” or “vent”. At first, I thought this proved J.K.R. was a bit off with Viktor’s accent, but then-not to sound like I’m undercutting Stan’s English-speaking ability- I thought that perhaps Stan had perhaps practiced “w”-words while learning English, just like how a person learning to speak Spanish would practice subtleties that native Spanish speakers would do, such as trilling the “r”s in certain words (speaking from experience).

So I listened to another native Bulgarian speaker speak English. And it turns out, his accent was just the same as Stan’s:

which leads me to a conclusion: either both of these guys have seriously practiced saying “w”-words, or the accent book (and J.K. Rowling) are wrong about how to portray a real Bulgarian accent.

How to write a Bulgarian accent

I’ve written about The D.C. Comics Guide to Writing Comics in “Viktor is not dumb!“, but here it is again, and in quote form:

Use dialect[*] at your own risk.

Not that dialect is, in itself, bad. On the contrary, it has a long and honorable history, especially in American fiction. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, arguably the greatest of American novels, is written entirely in dialect. Its author, Mark Twain, né Samuel Clemens, claimed to be able to identify the dialects of different Missouri counties and, presumably, to render them accurately. But few of us have the ear or the talent, not to mention the genius, of Mr. Clemens. The danger in using dialect is twofold: First, it’s hard to do and when it fails, it often fails big; and, second, historically it has contributed to racial and ethnic stereotypes….

Am I telling you avoid dialect, ever and always? No. If you have a gift for it-if you’re sure you have a gift for it-then use it. If you are not so gifted, you can make effective use of what I am hereby dubbing “pseudo dialect.” The technique here is to suggest a dialect without attempting to reproduce it literally…

But what hat about a…foreigner speaking English? Zut alors! ze Frenchman, ’e speaks like zis? Well, he can, but again, moderation is advised. My French national was drawing perilously close to stereotyping and, that aside, such torturous locutions can get pretty tiresome pretty quickly…But the sentence, he could be awkwardly phrased, with perhaps the wrong pronoun. This strangeness could be suggesting a speaker not familiar with the English. (p. 72-73)

I know the book I quoted from is for writing comics, but these rules apply to novel writing as well, and in a nutshell, D.C. Comics Guide author Dennis O’Neil wrote that the best way to write an accent is to be subtle without being tiring for both the writer and the reader. Furthermore, I would suggest to research the accent you’re trying to write if you’re not familiar with it (unlike a lot of movie stars who try to do southern American accents and fail miserably. I come from the south, and even though I don’t have much of an accent, I am highly familiar with the southern sound, so it gets annoying to hear the “Scarlett O’Hara” accent portrayed over and over in movies as if it’s a fact that all southerners talk this way. But this tangent is neither here nor there, so I digress). So, does J.K.R. accomplish this?

Well, taking in the information disseminated from O’Neil and the two videos above, I’d say yes and no. Yes in that she did keep the accent to a minimum-she only wrote the “w”s as “v”s and added nothing else. No in that she wrote the “w”s as “v”s, according to the videos and the accents heard in them.

I dare say that Fleur got the worst end of the accent writing. Here’s one of her quotes from the Harry Potter Wikia:

“We ‘ave all be ‘oping to be chosen for weeks and weeks! Ze honour for our schools! A thousand Galleons prize money – zis is a chance many would die for!”

Since O’Neil uses French as an example of a non-native English speaker, comparatively we could deduce that J.K.R. is on the very edge of writing a stereotypical French accent.

When to write an accent

The example of French above is probably a good indication of when not to write an accent. For English speakers, it gets tedious to replace “z”s with “th”s so the sentence can fit in their knowledge of language, and it makes you start dismissing what a character has to say, if not the whole character themselves. To lightly indicate that someone is not a native English speaker, as shown in O’Neil’s example is perhaps the better option. If you’re very familiar with the accent you’re going to write, go ahead and write it.

But that’s if you’re writing a novel, novella, or short story. If you’re writing a comic book, you have to put some semblance of an accent in your writing if your character’s got one. I thought I’d address this since I was thinking about how Alan Moore wrote a very thick brogue for his character Ally in V for Vendetta and why it seemed to work. I believe it worked well was due to the fact that we had the pictures to tell us if Ally was intelligent or not. We could see the emotions on his face, see that this person was especially street-smart, intelligent, and crafty, and concentrate less on the thick accent (although it did get hard to decipher, in all honesty). Comic books are a more visual medium, so if someone’s got an accent, it needs to be put in there so the viewer can see it and thereby identify that person with their native country/region/province/etc.; if you write a comic book using my method of describing accents, you’ll be leaving a portion of the characterization out and the reader will think your character comes from America or England when they actually come from France or Bulgaria (and even with British English, you have to specify that it’s British English, not American English). But, just as you would when writing a regular book, you have to make sure you get the accent right. If you’re familiar with the accent, like how Alan Moore probably is familiar with Irish accents, you’re more than apt to write it. If you have a natural talent for accents, fine. If you can’t, then hint subtly at it.

I think I’ve exhausted this enough. Hopefully, I’ve made my stance on Viktor’s accent more concrete. If I got anything across, I hope it’s that accents can jazz up a character’s speaking voice, but they can be extremely dangerous. They should be used with precaution and deft skill.

* O’Neil uses the word “dialect” interchangeably for both “dialect” and “accent.”

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Tags: Harry Potter, Viktor Krum