The Origins of the Pirate Accent

Swashbuckling tales of pirates hunting down ships and fighting crews for gold have long fascinated storytellers and audiences. The golden age of piracy, spanning the 1680s to the 1720s, has captured imaginations with infamous figures like Henry Morgan, Edward “Blackbeard” Teach and Captain William Kidd.

Early accounts of piracy helped to mythologize these nautical thieves, such as Alexandre Exquemelin’s The Buccaneers of America (1678) and A General History of the Pyrates (1724) by Captain Charles Johnson. However, it was Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure tale Treasure Island that popularized the images of peg-legged pirates with parrots and treasure maps marked with an X for buried loot. 

In 1950, Walt Disney Pictures released its adaptation of Treasure Island. Initially envisioned as an animated movie, Disney ultimately decided to make it his first fully live-action feature film. One actor didn’t just help to make Treasure Island a box office hit, but is credited with establishing the stereotypical pirate accent.

Robert Newton’s portrayal of Long John Silver in Disney's 1950 film adaptation of Treasure Island set the template for pirate performance. In the story, the villainous Silver joins young Jim Hawkins’ voyage to find buried treasure. Critics raved about Newton’s work. Time praised his “eye-rolling, lip-twitching” mannerisms and the New York Times magazine called his “driving vigor and cunning” impressive.

But Newton didn’t just pick Silver’s voice at random. Disney’s adaptation of Treasure Island was set in the West Country of England, home to many legendary pirates and sailors—like Blackbeard, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and Lady Mary Killigrew. Newton was also born and raised in Dorset, England, which is part of the same region.

For his performance, Newton exaggerated his native accent. Linguist Molly Babel told the Vancouver Sun that people from the West Country “tend to emphasize their r’s” and “replace the verbs ‘is’ and ‘are’ with ‘be,’ and indeed, use the word ‘arrr’ in place of ‘yes.’” Newton was also able to tap into his own history to portray the character, as he was a Royal Navy veteran during World War II.

Before his death in 1956, Newton built a reputation as the definitive pirate actor by reprising his role as Long John Silver in the eponymous 1954 film and a subsequent TV miniseries in the mid-1950s. He also played Blackbeard in the 1952 film Blackbeard The Pirate.

It is true that many pirates originated from Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, Dorset and Bristol. The West Country’s proximity to water and its large number of ports meant that many men in the region became sailors and then pirates, plus it also had numerous coves and inlets where stolen wares could be hidden and smuggled.

But many pirates also came from other ports in Europe. Henry Morgan and Bartholomew Roberts were Welsh, Captain William Kidd was Scottish and Anne Bonny hailed from Ireland. The golden age of pirates “included large numbers of Scots, Irish, Africans and French, as well as a smattering of Dutchmen, Swedes and Danes," said Colin Woodard, the author of The Republic of Pirates. "Of those of English origin, the largest number were probably from London." Woodard also notes that since there are no recordings of pirates talking, and only a scant number of quotes, there “isn’t much in the way of scientific evidence in regards to pirate speech.”