Tips for Writing Accents & Languages!
As someone who grew up bilingual and has spent years watching fiction handle this with the grace of a person trying to parallel park a cruise ship: please. i am asking nicely. stop phonetically spelling out accents in dialogue. stop having your multilingual character "think in english." and stop treating languages as cute flavour when they're actually load-bearing walls. let me explain:
⊹ Phonetic accent spelling-- "ze said zis," "I canna doo eet," "ees very 'ot"--does not convey an accent. it conveys that you find the accent hard to read and mildly comedic. actual accents are not misspellings. they are specific music, rhythm, stress patterns, vowel shapes that cannot be represented in text that way. what conveys accent is word order, idiom, the things a speaker reaches for. A character who says "it doesn't matter, leave it" and a character who says "never mind, let it go" are from different places. use that. not the apostrophes.
⊹ Multilingual people do not experience their languages as separate filing cabinets they access one at a time. languages blur and overlap and interfere with each other in beautiful ways. When you're tired you reach for the word from the other language because it's closer. when you're emotional you revert to your first language because it's where your feelings actually live. when you're angry you swear in the language you learned swearing in. when you're tender you use the diminutives and endearments that don't translate. your bilingual character's language choice in every scene is characterisation. use it as such.
⊹ the thing about not having a word for something is real and it matters. Every language has concepts the others can't carry cleanly. the grief for something you never had. the specific quality of afternoon light. the feeling of wanting to be home while you're already there. when your character encounters something their language doesn't have a word for, they don't just find a workaround, they feel the gap. they feel slightly untranslatable. multilingual people live with the knowledge that some part of who they are exists only in one language and cannot be fully brought across.
⊹ Language loss is grief and almost no one writes it. immigrants who stop speaking their first language regularly lose fluency within a generation, not the language itself but the ease of it, the poetry of it, the ability to joke in it. your character might understand everything their grandmother says and be unable to reply with the same grace. they reach for a word and find a hole. they dream in a language they can no longer speak fluently while awake. the untended first language going quiet is a whole kind of mourning and fiction almost never touches it.
