#[ // sorry but my sexuality is when kid gets mad and starts using scottish idioms and i'm not going to apologize for it. ]

[ferromagnetiic]

Headcanons on Kid's accent quirks.

Alright, so this has been bothering the hell out of me recently, and I need to get all of this out in the open and clarify a bunch of things. I'm going to write a condensed version on his carrd eventually, but I wanted to have a full version written here so I can elaborate as much as I want without feeling restricted.

We all know that I remind everyone every twenty seconds that Kid is very Scottish; or, rather, the One Piece equivalent of Scottish. For the sake of explaining what I'm talking about, just bear with me temporarily and pretend his birth island is an exact replica of Scotland for a moment.

When I first started writing him more seriously, I decided to give him the quirk of intentionally hiding his accent, because when he doesn't, his accent is actually VERY heavy, often to the point where people not very familiar with the accent might not fully understand what he's saying, and he loathes having to repeat himself. Additionally, sometimes people might try to tease him or mock him for it, and while he himself doesn't care about that himself, some of his nakama are also from his birth island, and by insulting his accent, they're also being ridiculed, so he's like "fuck you, you don't deserve to hear it if you're gonna be a little shit about it". Anyway, he masks his accent to different levels, and it comes in several different degrees:

1) Entirely masked, so you probably wouldn't notice it at all unless you were familiar with it or actively listening out for it.

2) Mostly masked, so he might have a little more oomph in his R sounds and he has more depth in his O sounds, but it's still speaking fairly neutrally. There's a natural growl in his words and his vowels are affected.

3) Somewhat masked; he's actively speaking with a distinct Scottish accent, but only uses occasional Scottish slang, phrases, or idioms, so it's unlikely you wouldn't be able to understand him.

4) Not masking at all, full blown accent out, using slang and terminology exclusive to his birth island, phrases people might not know, specific idioms, etc etc.

5) Literally speaking Scots Gaelic which isn't the same thing but I like when he does that so I'm mentioning it here.

Usually I have him at a 1 when he's meeting someone new and/or is being serious and intense, annunciating, actively and consciously masking. Most of the time, he's around a 2 as a neutral default. He starts slipping into a 3 when he's losing his composure a bit and not really thinking about masking, so when he starts getting very pissed off, when he's a little to moderately intoxicated, if he's feeling unwell or in pain, tired, or if he's just relaxing around his nakama. He's only at a 4 when he's exclusively around the select members of his crew from his birth island, so Killer, Heat, Wire, and a couple of the other guys who've known him since before they became pirates. Alternatively, he'll do it publicly or if he's extremely, EXTREMELY drunk. It also doesn't help that he's slurring his words really heavily when he's drunk enough to do this, so sometimes even Killer is just like. "I don't think that was even a real sentence..." He only speaks Gaelic with Killer, and then later with Shou (@snowdrcp) because she starts learning the language.

Anyway, finally on to why I'm actually making this post this long and detailed.

Normally I only mention an increase in the degree of Kid's accent in the monologue, and I don't normally write it phonetically in his dialogue because I would have to add a translator's note every single time, and to be honest, I'm just not familiar enough with Scottish to make it sound all that natural. However, when Kid is speaking casually, I do like to change some specific words, such as "you" becoming "ya", and "your/you're" becoming "yer", as well as removing the G from words ending in -ing. This isn't so much meant to be an indicator of his accent or its intensity but instead because Kid just talks naturally colloquially in my head, and he often has a bit of a husky drawl. I don't always include this; sometimes it makes the sentence structure sound weird, or sometimes if he's really focused or alert, he's annunciating more and therefore doesn't speak so informally. However, he sounds really stiff in my head if I don't include this in his regular dialogue, and I intended for it to be a subtle reminder of the fact that he's speaking lazily even when he's not exposing his accent very much.

My problem is that when I make him sound more Scottish, like a 3 and up, every time he says the words "you" or "your/you're" it would not sound like "yer" at all; due to the way Scottish accents sound when pronouncing those syllables, it would be pronounced more like "yooh", and "yoohr". So sometimes, I have the issue of Kid getting angry at someone he's yelling at, and I'm writing his dialogue, but for the sake of being consistent I'm keeping him using "ya" and "yer", even though it isn't congruent with how he would actually be speaking if it was audible and not written dialogue. My concern is that if I suddenly switch over mid conversation, it's going to look ugly from a writing perspective, and kind of sloppy on my part if I keep changing how I'm writing the same words.

I guess I basically just wanted to explain how I intend for his voice to sound, and ask if it would be an issue for anyone if I started throwing in some "yoohs" and "yoohrs" to flavor his dialogue when I feel it's appropriate to do so, without people thinking it's a typo/mistake, or inconsistent.

I'd love to have opinions on whether doing this would look too unnatural or peculiar, and I'd be really grateful for any kind of feedback on the issue.

Thanks so much if you read all of that and made it to the end!