On September 19, 1995, the first International Talk Like A Pirate Day was held. It began a few months earlier when a couple of friends were messing around at talking like pirates, as friends do, and they decided to make a new holiday where everyone around the world would be encouraged to speak in a pirate accent for the day. One of the guys suggested September 19 as the date, as it was his ex-wife’s birthday and he wouldn’t have any trouble remembering it. A few years later, Dave Barry wrote about the day in his column and it started becoming the widely recognized event it is today, with chain restaurants offering discounts if you’re dressed as a pirate and even the State of Michigan recognizing it as an official holiday. The only problem with it, and I’m not endeavoring to tear down a whimsical and fun holiday, is that we have very little proof of what pirates actually sounded like.
It’s always interesting to imagine the kinds of voices and speech patterns people from the past had. We really have no idea, outside of written descriptions, how people who lived more than a hundred years ago spoke and sounded. The earliest known recording of a human voice is generally agreed to be a ten-second reel of a folk song recorded in 1860, although if you listen it’s not really understandable or recognizable as anything more than humming (see video below). There is speculation, which can’t really ever be proven, that before the American and British accents diverged from each other, colonists in the New World and Englishmen in London all spoke in an accent that would sound closer to the modern American one. This is despite insistence from filmmakers that everyone spoke in a perfect London accent before 1800.
As we have no recordings of pirates, and they weren’t the type to sit down and write verbose letters, we have little indication of what words they used and especially how they pronounced them. So then how did we arrive at our modern notion that pirates called everyone “matey” and began sentences with prolonged a “arrrr”? The answer lies, as you might have expected, in Hollywood.
In 1950, Disney released yet another adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The notorious pirate Long John Silver was portrayed by Robert Newton, an English actor who had a penchant for playing scoundrels and hooligans, and who brought his distinct West Country accent to the role. It was somewhat coincidental that the fictitious Long John Silver, and even the actual historical pirate Blackbeard, both originated from England’s West Country, and may have spoke similarly to Newton. As was regularly the case in 1950’s films, Newton hammed it up when playing Silver, setting the tone for pirate portrayals for years to come.
While Netwon’s West Country accent laid the groundwork for pirates in film, many of the actual pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries may have actually sounded similar. West Country towns like Bristol and Portsmouth were where many privateers went to recruit new deckhands for their ships.They may not have called people “land lubbers” or carried parrots on their shoulders, but they very well could have heavily favored their “r” sounds as is typical with West Country accents. Of course, this is all speculation as while we know where they came from, we still don’t know exactly what they sounded like 300 years ago. If it is true that everyone sounded more American back then, it’s possible that pirates sounded more like they were from New Jersey than the southern coast of England. I’d watch that movie.