Everyone has a unique way of talking, which includes word choice, tone, sentence length, how fast they talk, when they pause, and meaningless expressions like "uum" and "uuh". Many of the most memorable characters have a very unique way of speaking.

You don't need to watch it on YouTube, to hear Forrest Gump's unique voice in even one of his least quoted lines:

But perhaps more important than having an exceptionally unique voice, every character in a story has to be distinct from the other characters in the story, otherwise the script turns into a long monologue delivered by a chimera of faces.

Scott Pilgrim uses extreme adjectives, and responds over-confidently to compensate for his insecurities:


Knives is full of energy! And her dialog suffers from ADD, jumping from topic to topic and listener to listener:


Julie thinks she's better than everyone else, wielding big words like she was some kind of authority figure:


In order to capture these personalities in dialog, an author has to be aware of them, and aware of how to boil them down to text. This is the focus of Challenge #6.

Describe how one or more of your characters talks. How do you present their vocal mannerisms? Do they have an accent? How do you convey that accent in text? How does your character choose their words? How do they deal with slang? What's their vocal pacing and how do you convey it? How extensive is their vocabulary? How do you keep them distinct from your other characters?

Bonus Question: If two or more of your characters come from similar backgrounds, (both snobby nobility, both from the Deep South, etc) how do you tie their vocal mannerisms together to indicate their commonality, without making them sound completely the same?

I love it! Great challenge and great examples!

Wow, what a great challenge. And honestly something I had not properly thought about yet.

Mmm this is an interesting one! /gets to crackin/

Alex is Outsider's protagonist but also it's narrator. Alex speaks in a manner that I think would be familiar to most American readers, using contractions and colloquialisms, and he has a dry sense of humor. The narration is a little bit different from the spoken dialogue in that it partially serves to show what Alex is thinking at the moment, but it also reflects a hindsight point of view of the events of the story, as the narration is coming from an older, later version of Alex than the one we are watching. As such the narration sometimes includes criticisms of the younger Alex's actions, or wit at his expense.



The Loroi are a telepathic species, most of whom regard speech as a secondary mode of communication. Their speech is generally more formalized, without contractions and mostly without idiom or metaphor. And technically, they are speaking a foreign language that is being translated for the reader by the narrator (rendering specific word choice less relevant), so keeping each speaker's voice distinct is a challenge.

Beryl is essentially a scientist, and so her speech is technical. She is earnest and endeavors to be polite, but she is direct and perhaps a bit naive as to what may or may not be considered polite subject matter. She sometimes substitutes the phrase "seems to be" for "is" when broaching a potentially impolite subject. Her speech is also peppered with untranslated technical words which the narrator does not understand.



Tempo is a diplomat, and so a much more sophisticated speaker. Her speech is similarly verbose to Beryl's, but more savvy and certainly much more calculated. She is more careful to speak in a diplomatic manner and not to use words that Alex won't know.



Stillstorm, the fleet commander, is as terse and direct as she can be, making no effort to disguise her feelings (or her displeasure at being forced to speak at all). Her dialogue is all italicized, to hint at the harshness of her speech.



Fireblade, the security officer, does not speak at all and relies on other speakers to translate her thoughts. Depending on who is doing the translating, Fireblade's message may be relayed in more or less conciliatory terms, so Fireblade's non-verbal cues are important in conveying the intended tone of her messages.

Nice work Arioch. When I read Outsider I definitely could that the voices you just described.

OK, finally attempting this challenge. XD It's a hard one (and a good one)! Get ready for Wall-O-Text. Fair warning: I'm going to go into a lot of ConLang information that probably isn't interesting to anyone else. XD

For the exercise I'll use Nikaya, Nefertiri, Sitana, Oluu, and Geoff--for a good variety.

The first thing about this that makes it difficult seeming for the entire cast is that I'm well aware none of them are actually speaking English. Language has a lot to do with the plot, so though the Translation Convention is in town for the Ama cast (the first four listed above) at the start of the comic, it isn't going to stay put and I have to be aware that there are certain phrasings that simply do not translate from English into their tongue.

Or maybe I don't HAVE to be, but I am anyway. Because I'm picky.

The second challenge is that a lot of the characters are from the same areas, thus why I've chosen a range of characters to use for this. The first two sets, (Nikaya and Nefertiri) (Sitana and Oluu), are each from the same Ama tribes: Kinari and Inta, respectively. The last, Geoff, is from an entirely separate country.

To begin with, Nikaya and Nefertiri are the series' main characters. They're sisters from the Kinari tribe--a nomadic people that live in a Savannah-like plains region and follow herds of wilder-beast. The Kinari are hunters and gatherers, primarily, a fact which is bolstered in their language. Many of their idioms are hunting or survival related, and their dialect makes flagrant use of the positional markers in order to free sentence structure.

Nefertiriis a fair example of the "typical" Kinari speaker when it comes to pure dialect. Her speech is often short and clipped, punctuated by emphatic hand gestures or looks to get her point across. What also influences her speech is her dry sense of humour and no-nonsense attitude. She tends to take her job, herself, and... well, everything very seriously. Most instances of her teasing or joking around are linked to people she's known for a very long time--such as her sister, or fellow Kinari huntresses.

Nikaya, on the other hand, has had outside influences in her speech that affect her to this day. Raised the first few years of her life in a different tribe and taught to speak a half-way tongue between Ama and Hurstikan, Nikaya's speech reflects . Though her dialect has rectified itself to a more typical Kinari style of speech over the years, in regards to her pronunciation and sentence structure, Hurstikan words often crop up when there's a gap in her Ama vocabulary. (It can be noted, however, that said Hurstikan drop-ins are conformed to an Ama pronunciation, save when there is no Ama sound equivalent to fall back on, such as 'CH', 'SHT', and the Hurstikan 'R'.)

When an instance of a drop-in occurs in the comic, it should always be written in the Hurstikan alphabet to indicate its difference until the Translation Convention shift occurs.

As the Kinari dialect allows for syntactic shifts through use of placement markers, Nikaya's sentence structure often falls under Hurstikan influenced VSO, rather than the Ama-standard SOV. This change is not one those that can appear in English (at least, not if I care about it making sense or sounding natural).

Another influence of Hurstikan in Nikaya's speech and demeanor is her tendency to ramble. When nervous or frightened, she'll talk for hours without ever broaching the subject she's actually concerned about. This is very un-Ama-like and considered to be annoying by all but her closest friends and family (Well, ok, it annoys them, too, but they're used to it.) She also exaggerates and often speaks in a flowery pattern that the Ama consider to be highly masculine. (Largely different gender roles in their society.)

Moving on, Sitana (no picture, sorry) is a woman of the Inta tribe who crops up later in the comic. Unlike the Kinari, the Inta do not make general use of the placement markers (though they do occasionally come into play and thus know what they mean), instead preferring to adhere to the SOV rules of syntax. Another dialect difference is a slight shift in vowels: an incorporation of /a+, +a/ diphthongs along with the /o+, +o/ standard.

This formal SOV standard could be represented in English by a lack of contractions and adherence to proper grammar in speech (something to think on).

Formality is not, however, Sitana's strong point. Bubbly and filled with life, Sitana is a sweet woman with a proverbial heart of gold. Her speech is a little more "masculine" in it's approach, like Nikaya's, though not quite to the same extreme. Expect teasing from her, and an immediate assumption that everyone and anyone is a long-standing friend of hers.

Oluuis the flip side to Sitana's coin; he is a loner, and convinced that he is happy being that way. Much more "feminine," by Ama standards, Oluu is briefly spoken and to the point. Much like Nefertiri, he tends to say much more through body language than verbal, and will always commit non-verbal replies where they will suffice. Even among friends, Oluu does not often or jokingly tease, and he is quick to both offense and anger. This is evidenced in his speech by a strict adherence to literal truth, which goes so far as an avoidance of idioms.

Finally, the Hurstikan prince, Geoff. As he is the only Hurstikan mentioned, I won't go too into the original language differences.

As was previously mentioned, Hurstikan, unlike Ama, is a VSO language--at its most formal, at least. Due to class dialect ("sociolect"), Geoff was instructed in the formal tongue and is expected to speak it at court; due to personality, Geoff does not.

Ever the soldier, Geoff's language has fallen to a mid-level sociolect that often times tries to make the language into an SVO, associated with the merchant-class and the army. It's spiced with a bawdy, and oft ill-timed, sense of humour that gets him in trouble with the Priests and his father. There is, however, a wit behind him which suggests that this lack of consideration may be less forgetful and more purposeful; he is strong willed and confident to a fault. There is a definite egotism to his voice, most often seen when talking to those he considers to be 'beneath' his station (ie, everyone), and is highly prone to boasting.

In the mid-way Translation Convention shift, Nikaya's speech becomes translated to English from Hurstikan, rather than Ama as in the beginning. This is shown by her speech becoming very clipped and impaired. Initially this is due to a lack of familiarity with Hurstikan proper, and later indicative of her resistance to Hurstikan ways.

Only using full, proper Hurstikan when she absolutely must get her meaning across, Nikaya commonly speaks it as though it's Ama. In other words, she treats Hurstikan as drop-friendly (meaning that parts of a sentence are left out of a sentence so long as it's understood contextually) language when it isn't, often "forgets" to conjugate verbs or adjectives, and never uses future tense. Her translations (when asked to from Ama) are exactingly literal and, often, openly hostile.


Whew. I will... proof read this later. >.> Of course, I have very little evidence for any of that which is open to the public as of yet. But it's still a good thing for me to keep in mind, I think. Sorry for boring y'all with my geekiness.

Cool. What's a positional marker?

Your comment about Oluu always using non-verbal replies made it dawn on me that some people's verbal mannerism is characterized by their avoidance of speech (I have a friend just like this; sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person in the world he actually uses complete sentences with). I'm gonna have to try a non-verbal preference character sometime.

Positional markers... are best explained using Japanese as an example, though they use particles and not markers. In Japanese the particle "wa" does not have a direct translation--it simply indicated the subject/topic of a sentence. Similarly, there's "ga" that marks the subject of a verb, "o" which marks the object, and more that mark specific functions and bind things together. It's sort of, but not exactly, like verbal punctuation.

A "marker," at least in the sense I'm using it (there are a few different kinds when it comes to linguistics), attaches itself to a word in the way that a casing does, but often without changing the base word. I can't come up with a clear example of this off the top of my head, but I do know that Swahili is one of the languages which uses a fairly complex head-marker system ("head" as the markers all attach at the beginning of the word(s)).