On inventing historical accent/slang

30 Apr, 2024

When you have to come up with an accent that doesn't actually exist in your language, things can get hard and a bit weird

When I was just a few years in the field, I had the chance to work on a AAA in which the story revolved around piracy, assassination, and the Caribbean. It's always fun to work with the concept of pirates, but there's a problem: the usual accent and the slang we all know from watching English media don't work in all languages because... not every place had high-seas pirating — Brazil included — which makes it difficult to keep the "pirate tone".

On top of that, the studio made it clear they wanted a less silly or stereotypical tone than that of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. So what to do? Well, recreate the language spoken in the 17th~18th century in a way that's not too out of place for the modern audience, try to keep the flavor of a nautical journey, and mess up the language just enough to scratch the surface of colloquial speech.

Bear in mind that none of the people on the team (me included) were proper linguists, despite almost everyone having studied linguistics at university. I think our efforts paid off, despite working on tight deadlines without too much room to wiggle around.

I don't remember exactly how everything was decided because it happened around 10 years ago, but I remember one focal point: Brazilian soap operas, and how to not sound like one.

So, a bit of context: I know people in North America are familiar with Latin telenovelas from Spanish-speaking countries (they are also huge in Brazil), but Brazilian telenovelas are a pretty big deal in Brazil. The thing is, the theme of the Brazilian ones can vary, wildly, from a power struggle between rural landowners, to a story about a human clone, love, and somehow Morocco, to a love story set in India, to lots of what could be called "historical fiction". The thing is that in a lot of these telenovelas, especially in the historical ones, the way people speak isn't "natural", but a stereotypical view of how the modern public thinks people spoke back then, and it all sounds very cheesy, which works for telenovelas, but not for a video game about pillaging and murdering. So, we wanted to avoid the cheesiness.

The first thing considered was how people usually think that formal Portuguese sounds like "old Portuguese", which in a way is right, and would be easy to implement, except it would sound like a telenovela. To counter that, we devised a system of rules for verb conjugation and pronoun usage that would keep the "illusion" of old Portuguese, but would provide more space to explore other forms of speech that could be easily recognizable by the players.

So, pronouns are easy to understand: there is singular and plural for first, second, and third person, just like in English. Each person calls for which verbal form should be used, meaning that pronouns can be omitted since the verb already indicates an implied pronoun — unlike English, where pronouns are mandatory since the verbal forms don't change much (or at all). For Brazilian Portuguese, the second person is mostly ignored, although some regions still use them. When addressing someone, most of the country uses the word "você" and the verbal form for the third person, rather than using the pronoun and verbal form for the second person¹. It's worth mentioning that in ye olden tymes, the second-person plural was also used as a formal way to address people of "higher standing" but, in Brazil, this distinction hasn't existed anymore for a long time, now relying solely on titles.

For the verbs, things are a bit more complex: despite Portuguese having only two grammatical genders, it has 13 verbal forms: 6 in the indicative (3 pasts, 1 present, 2 futures), 5 in the subjunctive (3 pasts, 1 present, 1 future), and 2 imperatives (affirmative and negative).

Ok, then, formal Portuguese makes use of almost everything just said above, but no one uses formal Portuguese in their daily life in Brazil (only official documents in courts and such still use that), so a lot of the complexity involved is removed in colloquial speech, aka "everyday lingo". What historical telenovelas do is copy-paste the formal rules to everyday lingo and treat it as if it was normal. We wanted to avoid this disconnect, but the game also couldn't sound like "modern speech", hence the rules that were devised:

• Every pronoun should be used, even the second-person ones, because it gives a vibe of "old Portuguese" when paired with their correct verbal form.
• Characters from "lower classes" use the second-person singular pronouns, while "higher classes" use the second-person plural pronouns.
• The lower the social class of a character, the more pronouns they can omit while keeping their associated verbal form.
• Characters that "fluctuate" between social classes, or are in the middle class, will vary how much they omit pronouns according to context.
• Verbs should have their correct forms all the time [in modern-day Brazilian Portuguese, there's a bit of linguistic shenanigans going on with verb tenses and pronouns].

So, in the end, "pirate speech" would be mostly comprised of verbs in the second-person singular with pronouns omitted, akin to what modern Brazilian Portuguese does with verbs in the third person (this is a generalization, Brazil is a big place with a lot of linguistic variety). Other characters would sound more or less like people from that time, but adapted for modern audiences and with less overlap with the telenovelas' way of writing. And of course, we also used words that aren't that common nowadays but are still recognizable to modern audiences.

To get out of the purely theoretical aspect, here's an example of a made-up line and how it would change depending on the speaker:

• English: Enjoy your day while you can.
• Modern Brazilian Portuguese: Aproveita o dia enquanto pode.²
• High-class character: Desfrutai o dia enquanto vós podeis.³
• Middle-class character: Desfruta o dia enquanto tu podes.⁴
• Pirate: Desfruta o dia enquanto podes.⁵

Notice how the verb "aproveitar" changes to "desfrutar": although it's still used today, "desfrutar" is not that common and gives an "old language" vibe to Brazilian Portuguese speakers. Since "desfrutar" is in the imperative form, it doesn't carry the pronoun around, so it's omitted in all cases, but on the second verb of the sentence, "poder", the pronouns come back: "vós" for the high class (second-person plural) and "tu" for the middle class (second-person singular). The pirate, which is also the lower class in this case, follows the structure of the middle-class while omitting the pronoun. It's very similar to modern-day usage, which is very colloquial, but with a few quirks.

And that's how we made a pirate accent/slang that never existed for Brazilian Portuguese. We also had to adapt some turn of phrases and pirate-y expressions, and that's something you have to analyze on a case-by-case basis, as there's no way of creating a set of rules that could encompass all the ways someone can express themselves.

It all still does sound kinda weird for Brazilian ears, especially when playing dubbed (oh yes, we had to do all of this while keeping dubbing limitations in mind) but at least it isn't associated with telenovela-speech and it's easy to get used to it. Given the short time we had to prepare everything and write the style guide, the fast pace of the job, the sheer amount of text we had to cover, the fact that none of us were specialized in this kind of scenario, and the fact that there wasn't a mob online complaining about the translation, I consider the job was pretty successful. The quality of the translation doesn't vary that much and the tone was kept consistent across a variety of characters with different backgrounds — meaning it's rare for a character to suddenly change how they speak in some chunks of the game, a common issue with large projects, especially with multiple people involved working at the same time.

To this day I find it funny we had to do a "historical-hypothetical language reconstruction" and, if I was in postgrad and doing research in linguistics or translation, would certainly return to the game and check what we got right, what we got wrong, and how it could've been improved if we had time to prepare for real.

Anyway, if you find our amateur approach to the subject interesting, then you should check what a Macedonian translator did to be able to translate Moby Dick into his native language.

#linguistics #localization