First, watch this video: Now, would it be either creepy or endearing if some teenage guy spoke English like that? (He's an immigrant but the rest of his family all speaks perfect English to add to the humor.) I think it would fit his naive, klutzy, and sweet personality perfectly, but that's just my opinion.
> Now, would it be creepy or endearing if some teenage guy spoke English > like that? (He's an immigrant but the rest of his family all speaks > perfect English to add to the humor.) I think it would fit his naive, > klutzy, and sweet personality perfectly, but that's just my opinion. It would be pretty odd to me. If his family speaks perfect English and he lives in an English-speaking country, then presumably he's deliberately choosing to speak that way. To me, it would mean that he's gone to some effort--substantial, sustained effort--to create a "cute", toddler-like persona. At least, that's what I'm getting from that very short video. And that strikes me as very odd for a teenage boy. In the video, the teenage boy seems to be finding it a little creepy even from a very young, small girl; from another teenage boy, it would surely be pretty strange.
Eh? No, speaking like that to anyone other than your established partner is just creepy if it's deliberate. If it's a matter of having an accent due to being a foreigner, then it's not creepy - it's just how it is - and it could be endearing if you happen to like the accent. Now I love Japanese to bits, grew up with anime and manga and I now teach at a Japanese school - but the Japanese accent has never been very appealing to me. I think Japanese is a beautiful language, but I wish they'd stop mangling English up sometimes in their animes and songs.
I missed what was supposed to be creepy. Maybe it was the butchered English. Regardless I wouldn't find it creepy, slightly adorable and slightly incoherent. It'd be an endearing attempt.
I wouldn't find it creepy if it were really an accent. But given that the proposed character lives in an English speaking country (at least, that's my assumption from the question) and his family speaks "perfect English", then I would assume that it's a deliberately cultivated fake accent. That's what I would find weird/creepy. If there were an explanation--say, the character didn't come to the English-speaking country with the rest of his family and he's just barely beginning to speak English now as a teenager--that would be different.
I don't know, neither? Well, maybe kind of cute? When did his family move to... the US? From which country? How old is he? Is he adopted? Your description of the family implies they've either lived there quite long or they already spoke English well before that. Is he one of those people who just don't seem to learn languages very well, no matter how hard they try, though they may excel in other areas like maths etc? Don't get me wrong, I have first-hand experience of learning to speak English, and while my accent is nowadays quite free of markedly Finnish phonemes, they still creep in every now and then, so an accent is difficult to shed. How would you show the type of English spoken on the vid in your writing? I'm all for you doing this, though. T.Trian and I have a Swedish character in our WIP and her English is broken. On another forum, everyone and I mean everyone for heaven's sake, were of the opinion she shouldn't make mistakes. One Swede went as far as to get offended that a Swedish character would speak anything else but perfect English. Yeah, that makes so much sense (besides, since Finland was colonized by Sweden in ye olden times, it's our prerogative to poke fun at Swedes ). In all fairness, in another story we had a Finnish character who didn't know any other English words except 'bastard,' lived in a tent, and drank moonshine out of a vat. I digress. Now that we've had the ms beta-read by several people, we're more confident that we can keep her English a little broken here and there 'cause that's the character, and it's not like she won't develop her skills over the course of the story. But we didn't "make it broken" because that'd fit the character, it was more like "hey, wait, she's young and so far has dedicated her life to swimming and sports, not traveling or a language degree, so how come her English is perfect?" So I'm not sure if it makes sense to break your character's English for the sake of naïveté and klutziness.
