Creating Future Accents: Fun, Fulfilling, and Phonological

In the most recent episode of my science fiction podcast, AE Reads Skiffily, the featured story ("10¹⁶ to 1" by James Patrick Kelly) included a time traveler who is described as having an "odd, chirping kind of accent." Accents are fun, but the details on this accent were sparse. To make my podcast reading compelling, I was thus compelled to take the measly clues given on the page and create a fictional accent. 

Today I'm going to break down what guided my choices in constructing a fictional accent and give you some examples of this in the character's lines with audio ripped right out of the podcast episode.


Naturally, the fictional future accent isn't the point of the story, so there are only a few clues that fill us in on the details. The first clue we get about this fictional future dialect's phonology comes when the robot, Mr. Cross, first speaks to the protagonist, Raymond Beaumont:

"You are a child..." Child was Ch-eye-eld.

It seems from Ray's crude attempt at representing pronunciation that there is some sort of vowel breaking going on. Technically, vowel breaking is a historical change turning a monophthong into a diphthong (such as turning Old English [iː] into modern English [aɪ]), but I don't know of a better term. You can see this kind of vowel breaking in the "Southern Drawl" that sees vowels broken up into multiple syllables. In this case, we can say that [aɪ] (the vowel of hi) becomes [ajɛ] in this accent from the future, at least before [l].

The hyphen after the ⟨ch⟩ means there is some sort of delay with that first consonant. English /tʃ/ is already aspirated, so it's not likely to be additional aspiration. It could, instead, be an extra long-pronunciation, but a native speaker of English who hears [tʃʃ] might just interpret it as additional aspiration, so we've got to throw that out. What I decided to go with is [tsʃ], which is a longer pronunciation than a simple [tʃ], but with two sibilant elements. Since a native speaker of English can normally distinguish between alveolar [s] and postalveolar [ʃ], they're more likely to pick up on the difference and therefore perceive the added length. For the sake of consistency, I also applied this to all the postalveolar sibilants of English:

• [tʃ] > [tsʃ]
• [ʃ] > [sʃ]
• [dʒ] > [dzʒ]
• [ʒ] > [zʒ]

The next clue for the accent of the future comes in Mr. Cross's next line:

"What is the date?" It said da-ate-eh.
For a moment I thought it meant data. Data?

From Ray's stumbling use of English orthography for phonetic transcription (a fool's errand on any day), we can surmise that the silent e is being pronounced in the word date, possibly as [e] or [ɛ]. This could be a spelling pronunciation or a phonotactic constraint on coda consonants. It also seems like /eɪ/ is pronounced with that same sort of breaking, like [ə.eɪ].

Actually, it seems like breaking is a consistent feature of Cross's future dialect. When he says, "I am not invisible", Raymond says that Cross "squeezed about eight syllables into invisible." Normally, invisible has four syllables: [ɪn.vɪ.zɪ.bəl]. If Cross the time-traveling robot from the future has a pattern of vowel-breaking, it only makes sense that this is what's going on here as well with invisible. Going strongly with our Southern inspiration, let's break [ɪ] into two syllables (yes, this does indeed happen in the American South).

• [ɪ] > [ɪjɛ].

This will get us to seven syllables, which is close enough to eight for government work.

But wait! There's one more exchange in this story to help us with Cross's accent of the future:

"This is only camel." Or at least, that’s what I thought it said.
"Camel? "
"No, camo. "

In many varieties of English, including the one Raymond Beaumont speaks, /l/ is velarized (that is, the back of the tongue is bunched at the velum) at the end of a syllable. In more colloquial speech, this velarization can transform the consonant into a vowel (a phenomon called l-vocalization). Pronouncing the second vowel in camo as a high vowel that approximates this l-vocalization can lead one to interpret it as an /l/ (this is why, in my early Dungeons and Dragons days, I heard drow, the dark skinned race of elves, as drell, the acquatic aliens of Mass Effect). So it thus seems that Mr. Cross pronounces unstressed /oʊ/ as [ʊ].

Those are all the details that Raymond Beaumont gives us, but I'm having fun here. So I went ahead and added a few additional features of this future accent. I wanted these changes to be consistent with what is given, while not making Cross's speech so different that listeners would have trouble understanding him.

Additional features of Cross's future accent.

• changed all instances of [ʌ] to [æ] so that words like cup and fuck would sounds like cap and fack
• turned instances of [oʊ] to [aʊ] (In keeping with the breaking tendency, and inspired by the vowel shift that turned Old English [oː] into modern English [aʊ]) so that words like boat would sound like bout
• removed most instances of [h]
• turned instances of [ɜr], the vowel of nurse, to other vowels, usually guided by spelling
• replaced most instances of [s] with [ʃ] and [z] with [ʒ], which ended up making him sound way more Dutch than I intended

Here are some examples with IPA transcriptions for those at work and helpful audio files for the IPA illiterate.

"you are a child"
[juː ɑr eɪ ˈtsʃaɪ.jɛld]

"What is the date?"
[wæt ɪjɛʒ ðə ˈdeɪte]

"I am not invisible. This is only camo."
[aɪ jɛm nɑt ɪɛnˈvɪɛʒɪɛbʊ. ðɪɛʃ ɪɛʒ ˈaʊnli ˈkæmʊ]

"No, camo. You have not heard of camouflage?"
[naʊ, ˈkæmʊ. juː æv nɑt ɛrd əv ˈkæmʊflɑzʒ]

"I am naturally male. Eyes do not have gender"
[aɪ jɛm ˈnætsʃrɛli məˈeɪlə. aɪʒ duː nɑt æv ˈdzʒɛndɛr.]

"Oh Fuck!"
[aʊ fæk]


Creating your own fictional accent, either for a future dialect or some other fantasy setting is easy and fun. Just apply phonological rules consistently and practice by transcribing text into IPA with these phonological rules and then read the IPA. Anyone can do it. Even you!