Are there any particularly easy dialects with which to spice up my bit characters?

Question

I want to spice up some of my bit characters, the folk who only appear for a scene or two and fulfil one purpose. One way of making them more memorable is to have them speak an English dialect, instead of the standard English used by everyone else as well as the narration. It can add humour and also quickly identify them as foreigners or locals.

To be clear, I have no intention to write phonetic dialogue e.g. "Luk at zis 'ere"; I want to adorn the lines with some fresh vocabulary and a grammatical quirk or two.

The setting is a fantasy world so I can pick any dialect I want with no regard for geography. Fictionalising a dialect is also theoretically possible but I highly doubt I'd be any good at it; taking a real-life one is going to be difficult to render accurately. And studying a particular dialect exhaustively seems a great deal of wasted effort for one or two lines of dialogue.

So basically I wonder if there's one or more particularly "easy" dialects to use, that can be used accurately because they are exhaustively described, with a set of grammar rules and a good dictionary.

Answer 1

Oh, Yah, You Betcha der!

I would avoid a lot of phonetic spelling and stick to stereotypical expressions that you see in movies and TV. YES, that's awful, poor form. These are short-lived characters with small parts. You need your readers to immediately recognize the 'accent' and categorize it. This is what stereotypes DO - allow people to make snap decisions about how to relate to someone. You will also enhance accent recognition with stereotyped names (Lovejoy screams British, O'Laughlin screams Irish, Balfour screams Scottish). Telling your audience where someone is from puts them in mind of the accent also.

Anyone who's watched Fargo will recognize the rural Minnesota accent in the catch phrases it presents. Another good example of this is in the movie Drop Dead Gorgeous. I don't talk like this, but find myself oddly compelled to when I'm outside Minnesota, don't cha know.

British films and TV are abundant. Use a few very British words (torch for flashlight, biscuits for cookies) and don't get too deep into complex accents like Cockney. Similarly, Irish films and movies are rich with expressions with cultural relevance. Australian is the obvious classic (Crocodile Dundee).