Vampire Vords

"He's a vampire!"
"I object most stronkly. It iss such an easy assumption to believe that everyvun with an Überwald accent is a vampire, is it not? There are many thousands of people from Uberwald who are not vampires!"
"All right, I'm sorry, but--"
"I am a vampire, as it happens. But if I had said 'Hello my cheeky cock sparrow mate old boy by crikey,' what vould you have said zen, eh?"
"We'd have been completely taken in."

—Terry Pratchett, The Truth

Vhen zhe Classical Movie Vampire became szuch an iconic portrayal of vampires, zuh vay sczhey szpoke also became iconic.

In the novel Dracula the character of Count Dracula is said to be a Szekely, a Hungarian-speaking ethnic group still found in Romania. (This is one of the many characteristics that makes Stoker's character Dracula different from the historical Vlad The Impaler -Tepes-, who was ethnically Vlach and spoke Romanian as his native language). Bela Lugosi's native language was also Hungarian. The stereotyped vampire accent is therefore based mostly on the Hungarian accent, but often just shades off into an unidentifiable Eastern European accent.

A large number of vampires in fiction have adopted the same affectations in their speech. As more modern portrayals have been intrroduced, this has become less common, but it is still frequently used in comedic portrayals.

All of vhich ics to szay zat zare are an auful lot of vampires avound who vont to "sohk yu blaohd".

Note that in the original book, Count Dracula was said to speak uncannily good English. (In fact, when his guest comments on it, he explains that his pride would never allow him to settle for merely being another foreigner with a funny accent once he visits Britain.

Additionally, Bela Lugosi did not actually make his W's sound like V's. Check out the real deal here.[1] Even Martin Landau got this one wrong - compare the original "atomic supermen" speech in Bride of the Monster to Landau's version in Ed Wood.

A case of Small Reference Pools with regards to vampires, and a Dead Horse Trope.

See also Fang Thpeak and Sssssnaketalk. Compare The Coconut Effect

Related to Lzherusskie.

This trope has nothing to do with the Vord.

Examples of Vampire Vords include:

Vertising

  • Count Chocula, spokesvampire for the Monster Cereals.

Van Vorks

Vilm

  • Fright Night. Jerry Dandridge seems to lack an accent, but when he is in his true form, a touch of his real accent begins to leak out.
  • Completely avoided in the Hammer Horrors—though in Satanic Rites of Dracula Dracula briefly affects an Eastern European accent as a disguise.
  • Count von Krolock talks this way in The Fearless Vampire Killers. Oddly, his son does not.
  • Mined ad nauseam for “jokes” in the “comedy” Mama Dracula. Steel yourself for the concept that the term “wirgin” is as screamingly funny as the filmmakers seemed to think.
  • Dr. Janosz Poha in Ghostbusters 2 is a rare non-vampiric example.

Viterature

  • Repeatedly parodied in the Discworld novels.
    • Early in the plot of The Truth, William de Worde meets Otto Chriek, the vampire who will become his photographer iconographer, leading to the exchange quoted above.
      • A later book suggests that Otto exaggerates his native accent deliberately in public; if he acts like a music-hall vampire he's seen as a joke rather than a bloodsucking monster.
    • Reaper Man introduces Arthur and Doreen Winkings, also known as Count and Countess Notfaroutoe, who were mere middle-aged merchants before Arthur received a certain "inheritance" from a "deceased" relative in Uberwald. Oddly, although she has never been turned by him, Doreen is the one who affects a thick Uberwald accent in conversation, most likely due to her class consciousness.
      • In Thud Vimes remarked that he wanted to tell Doreen that she can use Ws, honestly - just borrow them from the guy who overemphasis his Ws (a real vampire trying too hard not to look like one), and added that her fake fangs rattle when she talks. Showing that the accent (or least Doreen's) is considered highly annoying.
      • This is at least partly because Doreen has come to the conclusion that, as vampires, she and Arthur must logically be nobles, and therefore she stands for a number of things that Vimes find offensive, so his patience with her is probably already limited at best.
    • It should be noted that there are many non-vampire Uberwald natives (Sgt. Angua, Moist von Lipwig, and a large number of dwarfs, among others) who do not speak with the same dialect.
      • Igors also speak quite differently, in a messy lisp; they also appear to be able to dispense with this if they wish to
      • Sally is a vampire that doesn't talk like Doreen or John Most-Definitively-Not-A-Vampire Smith, showing that the Vord usage is probably selective.
      • So is Maledict from Monstrous Regiment, though whether Mal is speaking Morporkian is a good question (and difficult to answer). An awful lot of puns don't work if you assume everyone's speaking Borogravian for most of the book, but why wouldn't they be?
      • None of the vampires in Carpe Jugulum used this accent (not even Bela, the old count). The inscription on the organ, however, reads "Hlisten to zee children of der night! Vot vonderful mhusick dey make!"
      • While Moist von Lipwig does not have the accent, he explains to Mr. Pump, his golem parole officer, that the W in his name is properly pronounced like a V. At which point Mr. Pump starts speaking in that accent in an attempt to correct itself.
    • Lady Margolotta, in The Fifth Elephant, speaks this way to Vimes, but not to anyone else, suggesting that she does it deliberately.
    • Wwwwhile, conversely, there are also reformed vampires wwwwho overemphasise their doubleyous, under the impression they're "fitting in".
      • In fact, Vimes thinks that "it shouldn't be possible to roll your doubleyous, but he did it anyway." He's not just overemphasizing them, he is in fact pronouncing them multiple times. Probably just to prove he can. ("He," in this case, is the above-mentioned John "Most Definitely Not A Vampire" Smith.)
  • Note that one of the reasons the Count keeps Harker alive in his castle so long, in Bram Stoker's novel, is that he's trying very hard to shed his own Wallachian accent. Assuming he didn't head off to Britain until he was satisfied that he'd done so, it's likely that the original Count Dracula sounded like a law-schooled chap from Whitby during his English sojourn. Jonathan even notes the Count's handle on the language.

Vive Vaction Velevision

Fry: Say "nuclear wessels!"
Walter Koenig: No.

Vusic

  • The Vampire Country band Coffinshakers use Vampire Vords in some of their songs.

VandupVomedy

  • Lenny Bruce helped to popularize this trope with a standup routine that showed Dracula as a pill-popping Henpecked Husband, and used the exaggerated Slavic accent to make clear who was talking.

Vabletop Vames

  • In the Vampire: The Masquerade 1.0, the Tzimisce were often characterized with this accent, probably to play up the Dracula connection.
    • In later versions, this is a flaw and strongly implied to be a mental illness.

Video Vames

  • The Dreadlords from Warcraft.
  • Averted in the Castlevania games, where Dracula has never spoken with a Bela Lugosi accent. (Interestingly enough, once Ayami Kojima established the franchise's character design style, Dracula's entire appearance began to hew more closely to Bram Stoker's original description.)
  • Joachim in Shadow Hearts: Covenant (who, as a Camp Gay, is about as far from Dracula as you can possibly get) still parodies this when he turns into his Golden Bat form. One of his victory lines is "I vant to suck your blood! Hehe, just kidding!"
  • The Legacy of Kain series mostly averts this. Janos Audron, however, plays the trope straight.
  • Rosso the Crimson, from Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus, uses this accent to go along with her "sexy lady vampire" theme. The intent is to make her sound sensuous and dangerous, but she comes off sounding more like Natasha Fatale.
    • Then again it's hard to make someone that Ax Crazy come off as sexy. And she did sound more Russian.
      • speak for yourself, she was pretty sexy sounding to me.
  • In Sam and Max, Night of the Raving Dead, the villain speaks like that. And in Gratuitous German. "You have interfered with my plans for the last time Sam *und* Max"
    • He's something of a subversion, though. He speaks that way because he is German, not because he is a vampire.
  • Mostly averted in Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. The only vampire to use this accent is Andrei, an old-world Tzimisce. The guy who drives the cab (there appears to be only a single cab driver in the entirety of LA for some reason) does it too. Who later turns out to be a vampire, and possibly Caine on top of it.
  • Conker's Bad Fur Day featured Count Batula, Conker's ancestor who mostly speaks Vampire Vords, but sometimes is caught not doing so.
  • In Kingdom of Loathing, players wearing the Plastic Vampire Fangs will have the words "want", "suck", and "blood" in their in-game chat changed to pretty much what you'd expect.

Veb Vomics

  • Used with the Jaegermonsters in Girl Genius. In the comic's SteamPunk'ed Mitteleuropa (where, as historically, German is the language of business and international standard), everyone speaks perfect English due to the Translation Convention... except the Jaegers, who have fangs, but thick German accents also convey to the audience the same sort of connotations (a whole semi-species built of deliberately exagerrated Prussianisms) that their dialect conveys to the characters. Some people in their hometown apparently picked up the accent too.
  • The Perry Bible Fellowship uses it to set up the punchline here.
  • Nosfera averts ths.

Veb Voriginal

  • In The Key of Awesome's song "Emo Vampire", the "old fashioned" vampire sings in this accent.

Vestern Vanimation

Veal Vife

  • In Real Life, Attila Csihar, the Hungarian singer of the otherwise Norwegian metal band Mayhem, has such an extreme Dracula-like Hungarian accent that it makes you wonder if he exaggerates his own accent to make his vocals more obviously reminiscent of Bela Lugosi's Dracula.
  1. ↑ He does say "it would be vell for you to return" at the beginning, but near the end he pronounces "wolfbane" with a w.
This article is issued from Allthetropes. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.