That’s part of my secret to being able to understand Tarquin and Kansin as easily as I do. Context is a lot of it as well, figuring out clusters of letters that MAKE NO SENSE by what’s surrounding them.

Though, sometimes it’s just a matter of having a running wordlist in my head — Kansin’s phonetics for “woman” and “human” always give me pause, and there was one night I had to translate Tarqspeak for Yva in an OOC channel — “‘Oan’ = ‘on,’ ‘yin’ = ‘one.’” — because both words made sense in whatever the sentence was, but they changed the whole meaning depending on which he’d meant.

And then I joined Alliance side RP and the whole Northern dialect makes me feel like I’m once more surrounded by Trolls and having to read and re-read it all many times over before finally understanding it. But Anna nailed it on the head. Reading it aloud does help to convey understanding to the pea that rattles around inside my skull.

One of my favourites is the Welsh speech pattern. Its not so much that they pronounce words differently from me (and I am a Kiwi so I hear things differently than you folks from the US do), its the words they drop and the unusual order that some words turn up in.

“Dont right know.”

“Went down pub, me.”

“Got five pound?”

I can listen to (and do, theres a couple of Welsh boys who drink at my local) these accents for hours and Ive recently been shifting Mac’s speken accent to more of this style of speaking.

I still remember the Tauren that thought everything my Troll was saying was some sort of curse to be placed upon her. Hehe.

The other thing that was fun was having a player RP having difficulty understanding the thick accent and using emotes of hand motions and scratches in the dirt.

She’d be listening to Bricu or Tarq and she’d turn to whoever was close by that spoke normally.

“What did he just say?”

She used to just annoy Indarra, because heaven forbid the oh so proper priest use a little word when a large word would do.

More becomes muir. However becomes ‘owivver.

Aely’s accent base (Cumbrian, from an English mining region just south of the Scottish border) is particularly known for swallowing/dropping letters, especially r’s, g’s and t’s – and even ‘th’ from most words, and since that means a lot of what she says is missing letters, I pick and choose when to use the mutations, especially in words that lose letters, since it just becomes really difficult to read.

Nae, she’ll still do a wee bi’ ay mumblemouthin’, bu’s ne’er s’bad ‘s allat, y’ken?

The other thing that makes accents VERY real, but also more difficult to understand, is the use of colloquialisms. Aely uses “radge as a maggot” – which means “stark raving mad” and “fash” – which means worry/fret/bother, for instance. But be prepared to elaborate/explain those too!

From a non-accent standpoint, the best thing I can suggest to anyone trying to decipher these is to read them out loud. The vast majority of the time, they’re phonetic enough that you can get a pretty good idea what’s going on.

Pill has to be easiest though, because she says what ever is in her head.