Why Are Fantasy World Accents British?

kodiaktau writes "An interesting article from the BBC News Magazine explores the reasons why most fantasy worlds use British as their primary accent. Citing specific examples from recent and upcoming shows and movies like Lord of The Rings, The Hobbit and Game of Thrones, the article concludes British accents are 'sufficiently exotic,' 'comprehensible' and have a 'splash of otherness.' It would be odd to think of a fantasy world having a New Jersey accent, or even a Mid-West accent, which tends to be the default for TV and movies in the U.S., but how do UK viewers feel about having British as a default? More specifically, what about the range of UK accents, like Scottish, Welsh, Cockney? The International Dialects of English Archive shows at least nine regional sounds, with dozens of sub-regional pronunciations in England alone. In the U.S., there have always been many regional accents that might be used in interesting ways. Filmmakers should consider looking at speech accents from other areas of the world to create more interesting dialects."

Comments

Re:Now think in American.

[shutdown -p now]

As a Russian, I can tell you that I vastly prefer American movies about Russians where they all speak English (and I guess at that point they have to use accents to make it sound "foreign") over those where they actually try to put Russian in there - because I haven't seen a single movie where it wasn't hilariously wrong in both accent and sentence structure.

Remember that scene in "Red Dawn" where a Soviet soldier tries to read the sign (in English) at the national park, has to make most of it up because of his poor command of the language, which results in a hilarious "translation"? Well, that scene is doubly hilarious if you're a Russian, because his actual speech is about as close to the English subtitles, as the subtitles themselves are to what's on the sign...