Quote Originally Posted by Zaq View Post
. . . we have a specific voice we use...
I don't have a specific voice I use, I just give them italian accents (except for one with an intentionally bad/fake german accent, it was funny at the time). And high elves get french, and wood elves get spanish. It happened because I was trying to correlate all of the languages to real world languages and therefore have a consistant linguistic structure. Since draconic is a common language of magical scholarship, it became latin (no I don't have an accent for that, I don't know what ancient romans sounded like), from their elven languages were based on draconic (read it somewhere, don't remember where, but it sounded reasonable), and thus elves needed accents from romance languages. Which elves got which accent was kind of arbitrary, but french high elves sounded right. Plus with italian dark elves I get to use all the mafioso godfather stuff when talking with them which added a nice touch, and thus the only other romance accent I could fake recognizably (note I didn't say well) was spanish and the wood elves got it (since they were the only other elves I was allowing).

After that common naturally became english (since most speaking in the game is common and my players and I are american). The ubiquitous scottish accent was picked for dwarves (not because it made sense, just a conceit to genre convention). I haven't had to go much further other than picking irish accents for faeries.

Wow a random little aside can get long quickly.