Pirate Language
"Tain't much use for fools, you may lay to it
- that nor nothing. But now, you look here: you're young, you are, but you're
as smart as paint. I see that when I set my eyes on you..."
So speaks Long John Silver in Treasure Island,
and so have spoken almost all the great pirates since. But there was no
"pirate" accent, as one would be forgiven for believing from watching
films. Not all (not even most) pirates filled their sentences with
"aaarr" and the like.
Robert Newton as Long John Silver
Long John Silver lived in Bristol, England, supposedly
the birthplace of Edward Teach, Blackbeard. In the early 1950s Disney produced
films of "Treasure Island" (1950) and "Blackbeard the
Pirate"(1952), and the same actor was used to play Silver and Teach -
Robert Newton. Newton then reprised his role of Long John Silver for "Long
John Silver" (1954) and the TV series "The adventures of Long John
Silver (1955).
Robert Newton was born and raised in Dorset, not
far from Bristol, so he knew the West Country accent which Silver and Teach
would have spoken in very well, and used it in those films. It is a combination
of written dialogue featuring West Country people, and the films of Robert
Newton and his successors which has coloured our ideas about the way in which
pirates spoke.
Some pirates certainly came from the West Country -
Henry Avery, Edward Teach, Ned Low and others - and they probably spoke with
what we now think of as being a "pirate" accent. But many others came
from other parts of Britain, from Wales, Scotland, from the North Country;
others came from other countries, from France, Holland, the Carribean and the
American colonies. Those pirates would all have had their own accents from
their own homes and would not have spoken "loike a poirate, arrr".