2775: The Pirate(d) Accent Jul 26, 2024

The classic pirate accent is not only characterized by its distinctive Arrr!. While there are some other lexical additions, like the use of ‘ye’ rather than ‘you [all]’ even sometimes in the singular, the word ‘matey’ (e.g. “avast, ye matey” [sic]) or ‘hearties’, it also features a number of other regular phonetic and syntactic rules typical of a normal dialect. In actual fact, it basically is a normal dialect, as a somewhat cheap or at least unknowing interpretation of the West Country accent. 

The pirate accent came to be after the 1950 Disney film "Treasure Island", featuring the actor Robert Newton in the role of Long John Silver. Robert Newton hailed from Dorset, part of England's West Country. This region's accent has certain features that lend themselves to the exaggerated, rugged, and not high-society sound that lent itself well for use in the film, and he used his normal accent.

The West Country accent includes rolled R's, ‘me’ instead of ‘my’, as well as the word ‘be’ in place of ‘am’ / ‘is’, and historically ‘bist’ instead of ‘are’ (2nd p.s.) but this is not a feature of the pirate accent. Other similarities include /aɪ/ (vowel in ‘time’) as [ɑɪ], or [əɪ], rhoticity (i.e. pronouncing all R’s), and t-glottalization. Other typical West Country phonetic features did not become pirated, as it were, like h-dropping and fricative voicing (e.g. f →v; s→z). This is only scratching the surface.

It is not right to call the pirate accent exactly the same we West Country, certainly not in the way that many people have taken and simplified such features as it increased in popular use, but it would not exist were it not for the West Country origins.