Interesting thoughts on accents

I was doing my down-time blog hopping at work and stumbled upon the blog Another Day, Another Alt. "Altitis" is somewhat interesting to me — I like making characters and have a ton but rarely play more than three of them at a time. Even in previous roleplaying ventures where I've had many multiple characters, I've focused on only three or four at a time, story-wise.

Whoops, tangent.

Anyway, I was browsing through Tal's archives and found this entry about accents, which raises some excellent questions.

... in my old guild we used it quite a bit - it was an all-Dwarf guild, and the members were encouraged to use Dwarven whenever possible, and here's what annoys me (finally...) - Why would a Dwarf have a noticeable accent while speaking his/her native language? It's all nice and well when you speak Common, but Dwarven?

Now, the general consensus seems to be that Common and Dwarven should sound differently, and that when dwarves talk, it'll sound like Scottish - so the accent should stay. I don't quite agree with that. I mean, Common (or Orcish, if you're horde) is not English - we use English because, well, we have to agree on some language in order to communicate (and, being WoW an MMO, communication is quite important), what turns it into Common is the [Common] tag at the beginning of the line. Accents are a good way of stressing the fact that Common is not (usually) a dwarf's native language, and therefore when they speak it it sounds "different", but there's no such problem in Dwarven.

I'm of the inclination that this is right. When I speak in (very basic) Spanish or (extremely rudimentary, horribly accented and grammatically incorrect, I'm sure) Tagalog, I know I have an accent. But when I'm speaking my native language, I have "no" accent.*

Or, in other words, Scottish people think we Americans have the funny accents.

So even if you speak Orcish with a troll accent or Common with a dwarf accent, I would think you would be "accentless" when speaking your native tongue (as chosen by the language option). And you might comment on other people's funny accents if they comment on yours.

*Linguistically, everyone has an accent, but if yours is the one you hear most often (i.e., if you speak the dominant language and still live where you grew up or not far enough away for the regional accent/dialect to change dramatically), you're going to think of other people as having accents and yourself as having none.