A Plea to Authors of Urban Fantasy

So. I'm reading an urban fantasy novel. Big shift from my usual epic fantasy reading, right? And I've come up with a quibble that struck me once before. I'm not going to point fingers at any manuscripts, that's not the point. What's done is done. But we can be vigilant in the future.

Urban Fantasy tends to have immortal characters that have been around for a very long time. Usually vampires. But in the case of this book I'm reading, it's dragons and dwarves. And sometimes these characters speak with weird affectations and accents. Why? Because they're centuries old? Us mortals manage to adapt or drop accents in the short spans of our lives, why can't immortal (or just long-lived) characters? Especially when it seems pretty important for them to remain inconspicuous.

I don't edit books. At least not between 9 and 5. But it feels weird when your ancient character answers questions with "nay" and "yea" just because that's how he did it when he was young.

Ok rant over. Does anyone else agree, or have I lost it?

I think you're spot on. I might take it a twist further, however. I used to work with a young woman who had lived in the Northwest for five or six years, and who spoke with no noticeable accent. However, once a month or so she would suddenly sprout a Southern accent that would last a day or so. It would be on the day after she had called home to South Carolina for a long talk with her family, and her childhood accent would re-emerge for a brief period. I would love to see the characters you describe have the same kind of quirk - speak with a perfectly modern syntax and vocabulary, but revert to their ancient dialect when in the company of others with the same heritage. No matter how adept we become in adapting to linguistic change, there is something powerful and elemental in the first language or dialect we learn. It's part of us in a very visceral way.

Scriptophile
March 16, 2010
3:58 pm