#had to remove his rhoticism for the bit

[doompy-dread]

unfunny doodle #4852

[loveshacks]

johnny & gyro's accents

ive been thinking So Much about what the characters' voices actually sound like in sbr & i meant to make one big post about all the characters' accents but then it got wayyy too long so im just gonna piece it apart.

so here's my stab at johnny, gyro, and wekapipo's accents with audio samples and without too much IPA ^_^ (bc my phonetic transcribing skills are whack)

Johhny: johnny was born & raised in central Kentucky so you'd think he'd just sound something like this (srsly check that link that whole website is a godsend for this type of thing) but note that the lady in that recording was born ~40 yrs after johnny was. southern accents changed a lot during/after the civil war and then again during WWI/II, but i think we can assume his speech consists of a lot of 'long vowels' (think I (eye) -> aah and hand -> ha[y]and) as well as distinct w and h sounds in words like which and what ("why" would sound like, "hwa"). He would not have the pin/pen merger, which is my favorite feature of modern southern accents, since it didn't become very common until the early/mid-20th century :(. However he would pronounce gyro like 'jah-ro' and that's all that really matters to me.

Ok just a little bit of IPA as a treat because the wiki for old southern says they pronounced their 'o' (as in no) weird too?!! so here is gyro in IPA: /dʒaɪ roʊ/ and here is how johnny would pronounce it: /dʒaæ: rɔu/ ok.... [IPA reader]

also important to note that he comes from a family of upper class plantation owners (altho he lived not far from the Appalachian Mtns, that's a whole other ballgame linguistically. his father "was the owner of several farms" so I'm grouping the joestars in w plantation owners). Rich southern whites of the time had a tendency to drop their 'r's intentionally (non-rhotic speech) to sound more...dignified i believe. Not to mention Johnny spent a good portion of his childhood in England (i can't seem to find a specific location :/) where dropping your 'r's is like, the core of their accent. so there's a very very good chance he's saying "my horse" like, "ma ho(ah)se." He might even have some kind of proto-transatlantic thing going on depending on how much time he spent in england. totally by accident, too.

/lɛt mɪj sɪj'ɪt wʌn mɔo: taæm/

"let me seeyit wun mo(ah) ta(ah)m" (roughly) IPA reader again but she does pretty bad with it (be sure to remove the apostrophe's or she can't read it. for some reason). the [ɪj] in 'me' and 'see' is almost unhearable in the robot reader but in a real life southern drawl you'd for sure be able to hear how they glide their vowels. also the double vowels in 'more' and 'time' would sound a lot smoother; think about how southerners get accused of "adding syllables" to their words and there u go. +realistically he'd probably say lemme but im just working with what we've got 🕺

Gyro: as we know gyro is not only italian, but specifically from naples, because araki has some weird obsession with the place. but who am i to talk about weird obsessions right. In the manga it's referred to as the 'Kingdom of Naples' and is still essentially its own insulated country. This makes it A LOT easier to figure out his accent! Naples, as a region, has its very own language<- in this clip around :44 you can hear the actress mimicking standard italian ("they act like this they talk like this") the difference is mainly in the 's' sound, sharper in italian, and more 'sh' in neapolitan, like when she says "pa(sh)quale". notice tho that neapolitan has a fairly similar rhythm to italian, despite having a lot of different pronunciations + vocab, and, yknow. being a whole other language.

It's very likely that gyro doesn't even speak standard Italian because he doesn't really need to, insulated kingdom and all. Which would mean English is his second language after Neapolitan. Here's a guess at what he sounds like. The person in that recording has a pretty thick accent, and depending on how long gyro has been studying english (my cursory search for a reference to that in the manga turned up nothing) he may or may not have a pretty thick accent too. Then again i can't remember a time anyone pointed out him sounding strange or foreign or having a noticeable accent. I'm thinking his speech would be characterized by those inserted vowels (epenthesis) everyone typically associates with an italian accent, especially after dental sounds like "l" "t" "s" and maybe "r." It's more common for words in neapolitan (and italian) to end in vowel sounds than it is for them to end in consonants, whereas it's the reverse in english, so adding vowels in unfamiliar consonant clusters makes the rhythm of the sentence feel more familiar + easier to pronounce. so if he's saying "steel ball run" he's likely to add a vowel in there "steel ball-(eh) run." Also, rolled r's and those slushy neapolitan s sounds. (maybe his jokes are funny in neapolitan?)

/eɪ dɔn'tɑtʃ ɛt/ /ɛts'stɨl'ɛ'ʃpɨnɨŋ/

Reader again be sure to take out the apostrophes ;o

the [h](hey), [əʊ] (don't, own), [ɪ] (spin, sit) and [ʌ] (touch, cup) don't exist in neapolitan, so it would be a little harder for him to pronounce those sounds. add the 'eh' between the dental sounds (ll-eh-sp instead of ll-sp in 'still spinning'). + neapolitan uses the [ʃ] (sh) sound before p sounds so he would consistently be pronouncing spin like, "shpin" ;w; (source)

one more thing about gyro. cause like i said the [əʊ] sound (like in go) doesn't technically exist in neapolitan, or at least it's not as strong of a glide as it is in american english. so the 'o' in nyo ho ho sounds more like the 'o' in off and frog. and HOW has the [h] sound become such a central part of his vocabulary, when it has no place in his mother tongue? no idea. maybe that is just his natural laugh (i always thought it was forced because. who tf laughs like that). On the other hand he may have replaced the breathy [h] sound with a glottal stop (think uh oh) or just taught himself how to do the [h] sounds really well and this ridiculous laugh is his way of bragging about it. either way, he sounds a lot less like santa clause with the neapolitan 'o' sound, imo. and here are two different transcriptions in case you wanna hear the robot voice do gyro's laugh: /njɔ ʔɔ ʔɔ/ /njɔ hɔ hɔ/

Basically all the same goes for Wekapipo, although he has been living in the US and presumably speaking exclusively english for a while by the start of SBR, so his accent would be softer than Gyro's. I'm thinking they would fall back into Neapolitan when talking to just each other- i have no solid evidence to back this up but i mean they have no reason not to. also, throughout their conversation in chap 54 johnny seems to be retaining none of it. so...maybe?

....i'm not transcribing all that. but here is an audio sample of someone from naples with a more assimilated accent :^)

ok this got long i will do diego, soundman and maybe valentine in a diff post :^)