Because everyone is bashing them on Tolkien 's dwarves and the language he created for them. Heavy Celtic influence. In my own stories, the dwarves are the progeny of Bes, African dwarf god.
People who think American dialects lack diversity are only familiar with American news broadcasts. There are a ton of accents just in the South. In New York City alone, it seems like every borough has its own dialect.
THB though, Ive been to New York, Boston, Minnesota, parts of the south, and grew up in chicago--all those "stereotypical" regional dialects (mostly seen in movies) have practically died out except in the *south* For the Minnesota accent, its alot softer than portrayed in movies and sounds closer to Canadian accents (again with few Canadians save for Jordan Peterson even having that accent anymore), in Boston, I ran into a few people with the Boston accent. In New york I only knew *one* guy--and he was from Brooklyn--while *eveyone* else I've ever ran into just sounded like they were from the midwest. In Chicago, the 34 years I've lived here, *no* *one* has ever had the chicago movie accent, and speaks standard American/midwest dialect. Ive yet to visit Louisiana and see the situation there...
British accents are also grafted onto shows and movies about Roman history. I wanna see and hear Julius Caesar speaking with his hands and having an authentic Italian accent.
Harry Potter with a British accent doesn't make sense because it's fantasy. It makes sense because it's literally set in a fantasy version of modern day England. A Stormlight Archive adaptation should have a Korean accent for most of the characters, Szeth being a notable exception.
Even if most Rosharans have epicanthic folds, doesn't mean they should have Asian accents . . . We don't really know what their language sounds like aside from their naming conventions.
Has Sanderson mentioned that Rosharans are based on Korea? I mean it’s an entire planet with multiple different peoples and cultures. The Alethi have never struck me as particularly Korean, nor Herdazians or most of the other races. Why should they sound Korean?
@@Kaloffee They're not based on any real world cultures. Sanderson has said that the closest real ethnicities that the humans on Roshar resemble are South Asians and Polynesians. The exceptions are the Shin who would look European, Veden who would look 'mixed' to us with fair skin and red hair but also epicanthic folds (Like Bjork and other Scandis with epicanthic folds), and the Natan who are blue skinned and Iriali who are golden. They're also all extremely tall - Kaladin is 7ft which is only above average for an Alethi, and Shallan is short at 6ft. But that's only physically, culturally they are nothing like any real world cultures.
@@vannplaysgamespoorly1772 interesting! I’ve never actually heard Sanderson comment on what the Rosharans look like, so in my head I’ve always seen the Alethi as relatively Arabic looking, and the Shin as typically Southeast Asian. Thanks for the info
@@Fortunate_Fennec The genre is literally called "fantasy." We can literally create any kind of world we want, with any kind of magic, mythology, supernatural beings, yadda yadda. It can work however we want it to work.
lol, yeah, this. Pointed it out and saw it in a few replies, but American English was initially more isolated, so changed less rapidly than Britain's English dialects and accent, so is closer to medieval English...not that either really is. Middle English and Old English sound nothing like Modern English at this point anyway.
Technically both are equally young; accents evolve continuously, so British and American accents have more or less equally evolved from their last common ancestor. If you listen to recordings of either General American or Received Pronunciation accents from the early 20th century (the ancestors of modern stereotypical American and British accents, respectively), you'll find that both have some pretty big distinctions from modern stereotypical American and British accents (I say stereotypical since obvs there's a lot of regional variation in both British and US accents, and I'm just talking about the ones most people mean when they say "British accent" or "American accent"). The stereotypical "American accent" has preserved certain older features (like rhoticity, where R's on the ends of words are pronounced), while the stereotypical "British accent" is more divergent (picking up new features like non-rhoticity and the trap-bath split, where the vowels in certain words like "bath" shifted from an A like in "trap" to a long "Ah" sound), which has led to the idea that it's an older accent, but it also has lots of new features (like, at the time of the American Revolution it was still common in upper-class American accents to roll some R's, and the sound we pronounce as "Ah-ee" today, like in the words "I," "Eye," and "My," was instead pronounced more like "Uh-ee"). If you went back in time to the American Revolution, people from London and New York would have pretty similar accents, but those accents would sound a lot more like an unfamiliar regional British accent than a modern American accent! Overall, the West Country accent (the accent famously associated with Pirates and used by Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies) is probably the closest English-language accent to the accents you would have heard in London and America at the time of American independence, though even it isn't exact - no accent is truly "older" than any other on the whole, though some have more old features!
@@SomasAcademy It'd be nice to see a list of all the changes and compare them across dialects. For example, US Southern (Southeast) and Texan (Texas) accents still do some of those things you say that American accents don't do. I think the issue may be you're using London and Midwestern (the most "neutral" American dialect that is the midpoint between all the others), where the regional dialects may be more different than you think. And some of those aren't niche dialects that are highly localized with very few speakers. Southern + Texan is easily a full ~1/4th of American English speakers and a land area larger than many nations.
I think when it’s European based fantasy meaning dragons and knights etc. It makes more sense to have British or European accents. However, the one major exception would be the Wizard of Oz that is an American author, and the lore/setting is not Euro centric based. it is uniquely American fantasy. The Midwest, Kansas, farms, scarecrow, witches (think salem), woodsman the wizard who is really an inventor/politician/con artist. That’s in the Wizard of Oz. The accents are American and it makes more sense. It would feel awkward to have British accents in that world. Even though I think Glinda is the only character that I can think of the top of my head that has one.
That makes sense since neither North America nor South America had a medieval european period as it's written in fantasy. The same with spanish and portuguese. You would have to write another kind of fantasy.
Apparently they’re Brits out in Winkie Country. 😉 I mean, they can’t cast a handsome prince and have him not be posh. British = Hollywood shorthand for royal or rich. But yes the OG Oz books are some of the precious little classic American whimsical fairy tale-like literatureAmericans can lay claim to. Most of our children’s literature or literature in general doesn’t feel like it fits in with Alice in wonderland.
They do? That's like saying British accents don't belong in Star Wars. There's a point you have to do a little suspension of disbelief and accept that things are just what they are. British accent don't really make sense in fantasy, either, when you realize a lot of old fantasy base stories pre-date the British accent EXISTING, or at least existing as it does today. Old English sounds nothing like modern English with a British accent, for example, and Middle English doesn't really, either. Not to mention that, as linguists and folks that study these things have pointed out, (some) American accents are closer to early Modern English than British accents are due to cultural drift. By being more isolated initially, US/American English has changed less over the last several centuries. So this is literally entirely a personal perception "feels" thing with people that is actually the opposite of reality, as the British accent is actually more alien to a fantasy setting than an American one. But I tend to treat it like I treat Star Trek: Rule of Universal Translator. That I'm hearing it in my brain's interpretation of their language, not that these people are speaking Modern English at all. : )
Interestingly enough it seems that the American accent is the preferred accent for Sci-Fi. Which makes sense because America has always been a very forward looking country. Where English authors take inspiration from their medieval history, American authors take inspiration from the technological advances of America.
Yeah, the history of how America became the center of technology is fascinating, with the world wars devastating Europe, before then the language of science was German, with Britain as the most developed economy. But after the first war, then the fleeing of intellectuals before the second, saw America’s ascendancy, where by the end of the war, America had a more advanced missile program than the Germans despite focusing on bombers, after the war they would attract German scientists, not to help them, but to deny them to the Soviets. The Cold War saw the British empire and Soviet Union attempt to match the US militarily and technologically, but that only led them to neglect their civilian sectors, which led them both to collapse. Whereas the Americans by virtue of their wealth and natural geographical advantages didn’t have to care to focus on one thing, they could develop their light and heavy industry, agriculture, military, and technology all at once.
Nothing says, “I only know America through Hollywood,” quite like saying we all have pretty much the same accent. But i suppose i can’t complain, because i have only known of England’s norFern accent for a few years.
There are certainly a variety of American accents but in Britain you can have notably different accents with like 10 miles of eachother. With a good ear for accents you can figure out exactly where someone is from and there social status just by listening to them.
@@oyoo3323 Uh...it's well more than six or seven. And that's BEFORE getting to the very localized and small population ones, like whatever the hell that thing is that Maine has going on up there which I can barely understand. Even some of the localized ones are pretty huge with massive populations of speakers, like New York accent.
@@SubduedRadical apologies, I suppose the word "accent" is rather vague and ill-defined. What I should've said was dialects; and to that end, it's perhaps ten, and that's if we're being generous. If we speak of dialects, the Southeastern variants ones can be seen as just two dialects: Texan (1) and Southeastern (2). Southwestern (3) is one, which can be thought of as basically Californian. Minnesotan (4) can be counted, although it is functionally an extension of the Central Canadian dialect. You were right to point out that the northeast is where there's the most diversity, which is to be expected given that's where the language has been in the country for the longest, so let's add Northeastern (5) to the list. Alaskan (6) I can't speak on much (so do give me more information if you can), but I'm just going to assume it is sufficiently different due to it's Geographic seperation from the rest of the country. That now leaves the Standard (7), which, though was constructed to include features from all over the country, very clearly uses what I belive your folk call the "Midwest"'s speech as a basis, so while they may be multiple accents, they're easily considered the same dialect; this is also where I should bring up that the language as spoken throughout nearly the entire rest of the country, while certainly can be said to be many accents, is simply too similar to the Standard to be considered another dialect (for that matter, I know a fair few Linguists argue that Californian is insufficiently different too to be considered a dialect unique from the Standard. Besides that, I can think of AAV (8), which though derived from the Southeastern dialect, is easily sufficiently different to qualify as a dialect (although I think ethnolect would be a more precise term in its case). If there are any others you can bring up, please do. If I didn't mention it, it is likely for one of the following reasons: 1) I don't know of it. 2) It has too few speakers, thus is obscure. 3) It is insufficiently different from the ones I mentioned above to qualify as a distinct dialect (even if it can be defined as an "accent"). 4) It is antequated, even if well-known (such as Mid-Atlantic English). 5) It is actually too different to be considered the same language at all, thus is perhaps a creole (such as Gullah).
@@oyoo3323 I suppose it's how distinct one considers things and where one draws the lines between accent, dialect, and how many speakers and/or geographical area one requires to mark one as distinct. The US is a pretty big place. The US and China are tied for 3rd place in the world for land area (behind 2nd Canada and 1st Russia), and the US is third for population (behind India and China with India seemingly taken the 1st place spot now over China in 2nd). It also is a very culturally, ethnically, and racially diverse country, which also has linguistic influences to match that diversity. So it shouldn't be a surprise it has a high amount of dialects, accents, and languages across its peoples and territory. If you look at it in the most "10,000 foot" level, then around 10, yeah. But that's like saying England has 3. Sure, one could make such an argument...but at that point it's so lacking in nuance that it seems a mockery.
It's mostly because high fantasy media is mostly made by Americans, mostly for the American audience. High fantasy, more than any other, relies on evoking a sense of foreign-ness and unfamiliarity that one just does _not_ hear from an accent that sounds like the guy next door. So, directors chose foreign British accents to accomplish that. That's how it began, anyway. From there, the trope of British accents being more posh and "fantasy-fitting" developed. We _think_ British accents are more fit for fantasy, simply because we've been _conditioned_ to think that, due to British accents being used in fantasy settings. Of course, there's exceptions as well. The Elder Scrolls series has always a wide range of accents, but typically follows the rule of assigning American accents to humans and British ones to elves (as well as Skyrim's use of Scandinavian actors for the native Nord people). That gives the humans a sense of familiarity to the American audience, while the elves feel foreign and "different" from humans; a major plot point in the series.
@@skyscall it's mostly because all the fantasy media is based on European medieval mythology And English/British is the only language an American understands so its only logical to use English, Scottish or Irish accents in fantasy media Or English with a Germanic or Slavic accent
It's a good explanation. Myself I never ever felt any different by an American or British accent in fantasy, though being Polish, neither sound like the guy next door. But it makes a lot of sense from this American POV. If you hear British accents in fantasy since childhood, it's gonna build a strong association.
I agree. I didn't want to see Guy Ritchie's asking Arthur adaptation even though I love his films. The reason why is because the costumes, dialogue, and hair styles in the trailers looked to American and modern. Jamie Fox with a shaved head and short, meticulously groomed facial hair just doesn't evoke medieval Europe for me.
The problem is the generic American accent doesn't usually fit the setting. But, there isn't just one American accent. The Elder Scrolls games use American voice actors to great effect imo, because it's usually an attenuated or almost transatlantic American accent. It may not even be the accent, but the delivery of the lines. Someone like Linda Kenyon for example, who voiced the female Dark Elves in TES, had a very distinct, clear, non-generic American accent which was perfect in that setting and role. I often think that theatrically trained American actors like Armand Assante would be perfect for fantasy roles, and would be a great Marvel superhero villain. He in particular has an incredible range, but a distinctly New York accent. I think British actors are consciously and unconsciously more theatrical than most American actors. I think if more appropriate American actors were chosen for these roles, we would see no difference in the quality.
I was about to say that in TES there are a lot of American accents mixed in with British and Scandinavian accents. Even in the Witcher, if you play with the English language on, they speak with American accents (like Geralt). Finally, I guess it’s not technically fantasy, but I find it funny that in STALKER 2 everyone says to just play with Ukrainian instead of English. All of the English voice actors sound ridiculous being in the middle of an Eastern European wasteland and are all Scottish for some reason (besides Skif)
i love the va for redguards in oblivion and morrowind (he was also cyrus in reduard :D!!) never felt he was out of place, brittish acents are just a trope, that said i hate tullius his acent doesnt fit or maybe its the way he delivers it, he just sounds like a typical american getting mad about politics, sure the other va sounded ameican but he fits in the world, tullius sounds capital A american says racist shit at thanksgiving and complains about imigrants lol
Well, that's a great start, but we need to stick to that line of inquiry until we find a real final answer. It might have something to do with the American Revolution. remember that not everyone is literate enough to read the American Revolutionaries' documents (and this is because those documents are the first pieces of a new genre of secular writing, which gives religious extremists "pep" without making it awkward if their little brothers can't read). They only read religious texts before the revolution, and they always felt alone. They were "trapped" in their small groups and had to obey their oldest brother. Why bother learning how to SPEAK at all? Speaking was invented simply because Mankind wanted his communities to be able to conduct court trials, should the need arise. So that's why we call the US by the name of its continent, America". Because it has no name, no words, no speaking, and certainly no writing. So how the HECK CAN YOU EXPECT THERE TO BE A UNITED NATIONS which THEY HAVE THE ABILITY TO ORCHESTRATE? They are barely even by our sides nowadays, as members of humanity. They are also not even like the goats which we slaughter for meat. The goats are being supervised. The Americans are not. They have "planted a seed" of their revolution in "Turkistan" or whatever, just like every other place on earth which may or may not exist (it's not important whether it exists or not). Maybe it's time for them to grow up and become like their big brother. Did you know that I gave him that scar?
It’s funny because the first fantasy story that sort of kicked off the modern Fantasy novel tread was essentially American. The Wizard of Oz is American fantasy. Not to mention Conan the Barbarian’s author Robert E Howard was a Southerner and Conan was a huge pioneer in the Sword and Sorcery genre.
Princess of Mars... American. Mark Twain wrote a Conneticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court. plenty of American fantasy before Tolkien and most fairy tales aren't even British.
American English isn't "new". Our country is young, yes, but our language is a direct continuation of the speech of the original english settlers. British English and American English are equally as old.
@borplorp the dominant british and american accents are both young, and trace their phonetics to the same time period; the radio and what diction works over radio and what does not; and the diction of english filtered by what worked with radio technology influenced those who listened and spread
@borplorp It's literally well studied and documented that American/Canadian English are more similar to pre-colonial English than modern British English is. Both have gone through sound changes, but American/Canadian English went through less drastic changes than British English. There's no such thing as either being "older" than the other. One is more similar to the older version, but both are equally modern
There's a lot of very, very distinct American accents and dialects (Gulluh Geechee, Tidewater, Cajun Creole English). But they are probably too distinct for most people outside the US to understand. They are also very difficult to get right. I almost never here a really spot on Cajun accent on screen
Fun fact, Gullah Geechee and other African American dialects are so grammatically and phonetically distinct from other English varieties that a lot of linguists consider them essentially a separate language. Especially since there's a ton of variation even within these varieties.
@@arielgalles2107 wouldn't surprise me, we got our own dialects of Spanish, French, German so why not throw more languages into the mix. they are all 100% American and deserve official support from the gov and businesses.
technically speaking even modern British english isn't same as spoken in medieval times as old english, even the english of Henry the 8th is nearly incomprehensible nowadays.
There's so many American accents that people from other countries (and even some Americans) don't know about. Some sound totally unique and would fit great for fantasy. Even in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area there are over 5 accents and even "sub accents". I was talking to an Ethiopian guy just the other day whose only been in America for a year who said he can understand white Americans from DC better than black Americans in the area because they speak slower and use words he recognizes from his English classes, while black Americans from the area speak very fast and use many words and phrases he's never heard of or seen in text books, almost like another language. I'm mixed race and grew up in three different states so my accent is an interesting blend, and a lot of other Americans and some foreigners ask me what country I'm from because my accent doesn't sound like a typical American accent, I've also been told I should narate books for audible or kindle because I sound like someone from a fantasy book. So American accents can be cool for fantasy, just depends on the accent.
Met a guy when I was in the Navy from Maine who told me about Maine's accent. He then demonstrated it. It's pretty wild such a relatively small, low population state can have such a distinct accent, yet the people from there can also talk in "normal, understandable" English. I'm from Texas but grew up on the border with Mexico, so I don't really have a strong Southern or Texas accent (the two are not the same, btw), and people have said before I sound like I'm from the Midwest and should narrate books or the like since I have "the neutral American accent" people like for news anchors and such since it's simultaneously the closest to every other dialect, meaning it's the easiest "common" form of American English that the most people can easily understand.
@@SubduedRadicalI grew up in Georgia, as did my mother who raised me, but her parents were both from up north, so we both speak in a more general form of speech. Maybe it was my city’s large military presence, but most of my classmates didn’t really have a regional accent growing up. The longer I stay around here, the more it seems the Southern accent is in decline, with all the Northerners moving south and the population of rural areas consistently dropping.
they also work well in sci fi or space fantasy. we can easily imagine american accents existing in the future, it just feels off when it's trying to portrait the past
They do? That's like saying British accents don't belong in Star Wars. There's a point you have to do a little suspension of disbelief and accept that things are just what they are. British actions don't really make sense in fantasy, either, when you realize a lot of old fantasy base stories pre-date the British accent EXISTING, or at least existing as it does today. Old English sounds nothing like modern English with a British accent, for example, and Middle English doesn't really, either. Not to mention that, as linguists and folks that study these things have pointed out, (some) American accents are closer to early Modern English than British accents are due to cultural drift. By being more isolated initially, US/American English has changed less over the last several centuries. So this is literally entirely a personal perception "feels" thing with people that is actually the opposite of reality, as the British accent is actually more alien to a fantasy setting than an English one. But I tend to treat it like I treat Star Trek: Rule of Universal Translator. That I'm hearing it in my brain's interpretation of their language, not that these people are speaking Modern English at all. : )
It can absolutely work. Just look at JK Simmons’ work in Baldur’s Gate 3. Also, American English isn’t “new”. It’s just a different fork of the same English.
I have heard Brits say American movie villains have English accents because the US has an anti-British streak. This is not true. If you want a villain, give him an American accent like Darth Vader. Vader adds a pseudo-English accent to be taken seriously, but he is voiced by an American. The Emperor has a real English accent because he is the real power. He is to be taken very seriously. Note that the only person below the Emperor that Vader ever takes seriously is Governor Tarkin, who is very English. Americans don't take themselves seriously. They are more comfortable in the role of the upstart rebel like Luke, who challenges authority. Nothing sounds more authoritative to an American than an English accent. And that goes for authoritative ancient wisdom, too. Obi-Wan Kenobi is on the side of good, and English.
Sounds like a class distinction perhaps? Seems like the American working class has a stronger hold on the culture here and historically view the power structure as being rooted in the old world
@@beefsuperemeMaybe. Americans also know what Old Europe thinks about them, that Americans are dumb. And that accent is associated with being dumb. Americans aren't dumb, they know what they sound like to Europeans. Americans also like the idea of streetwise smarts. They like to see themselves as the person who gets things done, not talks it to death with "pretty" words.
8:06 this part I find really funny, because to Americans it’s almost the exact opposite. For British accents it’s basically just the three mentioned here, but I could place where you live in the U.S. down to the state in just a conversation or two. It’s all about what we’re used to lol
There are three mentioned here because they didn’t mention all the other accents. US has 42. UK has 56. Despite being 40 plus times bigger in land mass, US does not have more accents than the UK linguistically
Yeah, when I (American) was a kid, I definitely thought there were 3 British accents- English, Scottish, Irish. But when I was in middle/high school I got into a lot of BBC shows and now even I can tell Manchester, upper class London, cockney, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham and York apart, as well as Welsh, and I can piece apart North Irish from other Irish accents. I still can't quite separate Scottish accents, but I haven't been watching nearly as much British media as I used to. Auditory phonetics is a much bigger deal than we give it credit for, but it's so engrained in our lives that we don't often realize how much. I had roommates in college who couldn't hear the difference between what I was saying and how they were pronouncing it, which I heard as being very wrong. There was a whole thing in one of my linguistics classes where a guy from New England was trying to demonstrate that there IS a difference between "caught" and "cot" but majority of the class couldn't hear the difference because our dialects don't use a different vowel there. I barely could because I'd been in a different phonetics class the semester before and parsing out vowels that are very similar was a whole ordeal. It's the main reason why people's pronunciation of new languages gets better with time. It's not just your mouth that needs training, your ears need training to be able to process that the sounds are different to replicate better. So it totally makes sense that neither group recognizes very many accents in the other, unless you've been picking up on patterns from exposure
American dialects lack diversity? What? Somebody has clearly never heard American English outside of movies or TV. Most media relies on a "standard" Midwestern accent. But that sounds nothing like a New England accent. Lower Alabama has a lilt to its accent that would be perfect for elves. Cajun almost isn't even English. You could make a fantasy movie using nothing but Southern accents and get just as much diversity as with English accents. Throw in New England, Boston, New York, and the northern plains states and you would have quite an assortment of unique accents. Now I want a fantasy movie with Cajun dwarves.
America has many accents, NY, Boston, Southern, Appalachian, Midwest, Texas. Actors in America try to not have an accent. There's also Spanish accents of English. Lets not forget thug.
@@RPSchonherr "Thug" isn't an accent. It's also deeply offensive and borderline racist caricature. The proper term is African American Vernacular English, sometimes also known as Ebonics. It has an actual grammatical structure. White anglo-saxon speakers, or "proper English" speakers look down on AAVE because they've falsely associated it with criminal "thug" or "ghetto" behaviour.
@@RPSchonherr "Thug" isn't an accent. It's also deeply offensive and borderline racist caricature. The proper term is African American Vernacular English, sometimes also known as Ebonics. It has an actual grammatical structure. White anglo-saxon speakers, or "proper English" speakers look down on AAVE because they've falsely associated it with criminal "thug" behaviour.
"Thug" isn't an accent. It's also deeply offensive and borderline racist caricature. The proper term is African American Vernacular English, sometimes also known as Ebonics. It has an actual grammatical structure. White anglo-saxon speakers, or "proper English" speakers look down on AAVE because they've falsely associated it with criminal "thug" or "ghetto" behaviour.
@@RPSchonherr "Thug" isn't an accent. It's also deeply offensive and borderline racist caricature. The proper term is African American Vernacular English, sometimes also known as Eb0nics. It has an actual grammatical structure. White anglo-saxon speakers, or "proper English" speakers look down on AAVE because they've falsely associated it with criminal "thug" behaviour.
The Hobbit (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978), Conan the Barbarian (1982), The Last Unicorn (1982), The Flight of Dragons (1982), Wizards (1977), Dragonheart (1996), Dragonslayer (1981), The Neverending Story (1984)... Would you like me to continue? All great fantasy movies, all with American accents. Except for Conan. He was Austrian. Accompanied by a ton of American ones.
Has anyone ever heard that for Dragonball/Z/etc that Goku’s dub should be a southern American accent, because he is supposed to be a country bumpkin? It is apparently translated as such in the English mangas. I haven’t looked into it much but sounds like it would be hilarious
As someone raised in the state of Georgia, I am now imagining him as some farm boy with the same accent as my high school physics teacher from Stone Mountain.
@@JoybuzzahzMore or less- and he was written (manga) as uneducated, with childish grammar and vocabulary choices, more than a regional accent was given. His wife, though- Chichi could absolutely work an Appalachian accent in a dub. She's written with a conspicuous Northern accent, as an absolute bumpkin- socially more or less the Japanese equivalent of a hillbilly. I think Gohan was presented that way, too, but then also deliberately written with uncharacteristically adult and formal grammar and vocabulary choices, despite the accent. IIRC.
The longer the video goes on, while constantly playing clips with american accents, the less the claim that american accents don't fit fantasy feels like it has any weight tbh. You undo your own thesis with the sheer number of examples of good fantasy.
You should point out that in the MCU, all the major superhero characters mostly speak American accents except Thor. Why? Because Thor came from Asgard, which is portrayed in a "fantasy" setting.
Just because the United States is a much newer COUNTRY than England, Scotland, etc. doesn't mean that the language is any more "new" or "old", since ALL modern English accents both come from the same source and have changed over the centuries.
I think it's less "The American accent doesn't fit" and more "The accent must be specifically modern English. Perhaps Welsh. Maybe Scottish or Irish if you want to stretch it." And it's funny, too, because what we call the modern "British accent" was specifically designed very recently with the intent on being specifically posh to essentially separate the aristocracy from the commoners, and later the main-landers from the colonials. When the US was colonized, English people would have spoken something similar to many American accents. There's something similar with things like Latin. It's often portrayed as some grandiose British accent on top of Italian pronunciations. But like "Vini Vidi Vici" was pronounced more like "Win-E Wid-E Wick-E". Yet if you were to portray an old Roman story with that accent, you would be laughed off the stage. Medieval stuff would have probably had an accent that sounds a bit Dutch or German. But again, portray that accurately, and people won't know what they are listening to, and why they changed it from the" real Medieval British accent"....of 20th century aristocrats. It would be like saying "This is inaccurate. That Iroquois man in the 14th century would have DEFINITELY sounded like Audrey Hepburn."
This reminds me: The Irish comedy trio Foil Arms & Hog have a sketch about how accents are chosen for different roles, always the same accents for the same stereotypes for no reason.
I feel like it only doesn't fit when you're trying to do a fantasy set in the very specific medieval esque setting. Everything else it works fine, and fantasy frankly has expanded to be far more than simply vaguely medieval Europe. The Cosmere especially is a great example of how an American accent (in the audiobooks) works perfectly fine for the settings, which are either more modern or very different from past time periods on Earth.
@@WasatchWind All of Urban Fantasy. (Somewhat ironic that Urban Fantasy is very often not even urban, merely "not medieval". Even when it is European.)
You know, the funny thing is that modern American English is closer to British English as it were in the 1800s then modern British English is. If you get time, look up the 'rhotic R'. Basically a lot of things signature to the British accent nowadays is attributed to the wealthy class deliberately speaking differently to distinguish themselves from working class and poor people during the turn of the century. A similar situation in modern times you can look at is American Black culture and how aspects of their way of speaking have permeated into American English at large.
Americans have the closest dialect to 16th Century English. If you plucked a dude off the Mayflower and dropped him into modern Pennsylvania we'd be able to perfectly understand him and vice versa. The 16th Century was the start of the Early Modern Period. Actual Mideval English is Incomprehensible nonsense because english as we know it is a French Creole created by the Normans during thier occupation of England.
I want an epic historical set piece set in Rome. I want the setting, costume design, and over all feel to be like that of Gladiator (the first one obviously) or HBO's Rome. It might be about Julius Caesar rise and fall or about one of the crisis of the third century or any other epic moment in their history but the movie/tv series has to be sincere. However instead talking in a posh English accent I want them to have the most stereotypical New York Italian accent possible. Get everyone and I do mean everyone who has played a role in any a Scorsese film or the Sopranos on that set. I want here a lot of Aaa's and ooH's in the senate building having serious discussion.
Most people don't realize that the "standard" American accent isn't temporally stable. Even if you look at interviews with regular folks from the 1980's you can detect a difference with how Americans speak today. And don't even talk about the 1930's and 40's. In another hundred years American "English" will be laced with Spanish and other immigrant vocabulary etc.
@@huguesdepayens807Why not? Spanish is one of the richest languages there is (especially the Latin American dialects), so an infusion of it and American English, as is already happening, is a nice spin to see. Plus people would no longer be able to make fun of Americans for only knowing the dialects of their counties.
Guys never heard Shakespeare in a southern accent clearly. Sounds better than any British reading I’ve ever heard. Personally I’m not interested in peddling pure stereotype at my dnd table for the sake of someone’s mental discomfort at an American accent. Also the amount of people in these comments saying films should use accented versions of English instead of having characters from nations not supposed to be Britain speak with a British accent. Either put it in the language they spoke or stick with whatever accent you want, because lemme tell you… they don’t speak English with a Russian accent in Russia. It’s not more realistic, you just really like stereotypes
That's actually one of the ways we can piece together which sounds are less changed from pre colonial English than others- if the poetry still rhymes. I remember thinking it was weird that a lot of parts of Shakespeare rhymed in American English when they wouldn't in a British accent. Then I learned later that the modern American accent has had fewer sound changes than modern British English.
When people complain about Kevin Costner's accent in Robin Hood I like to remind them that if the movie were really linguistically accurate they'd be speaking Middle English and modern audiences wouldn't even be able to understand the dialog without subtitles.
The thing is, there are a lot of American accents, but foreigners usually don’t see them in shows because we go with the “Midwest” accent for the news and most shows/movies. I’m from the Midwest and aside for how I pronounce my “As,” I don’t have much of an accent. The only time you hear southern or creole accents, is when a movie takes place in the south or someone is from the south. You only hear New York or Chicago accents in their respective locations, or if a character is supposed to come from there. But, ultimately, while there are nuances in American English, keep in mind schools have worked very hard to teach kids the “Midwest” accent for the last 30ish years to the point even Texans sound like they’re from up north and not the South. Much like the Cockney accent (supposedly) the other accents are gradually fading away
@@dazai_.992No. New Yorkers have their own distinct accents. It’s supposedly distinct in each borough, but as a non-New Yorker I can’t tell hear the difference 😅
They do? That's like saying British accents don't belong in Star Wars. There's a point you have to do a little suspension of disbelief and accept that things are just what they are. British actions don't really make sense in fantasy, either, when you realize a lot of old fantasy base stories pre-date the British accent EXISTING, or at least existing as it does today. Old English sounds nothing like modern English with a British accent, for example, and Middle English doesn't really, either. Not to mention that, as linguists and folks that study these things have pointed out, (some) American accents are closer to early Modern English than British accents are due to cultural drift. By being more isolated initially, US/American English has changed less over the last several centuries. So this is literally entirely a personal perception "feels" thing with people that is actually the opposite of reality, as the British accent is actually more alien to a fantasy setting than an English one. But I tend to treat it like I treat Star Trek: Rule of Universal Translator. That I'm hearing it in my brain's interpretation of their language, not that these people are speaking Modern English at all. : )
I remember hearing a stand-up comedian do a bit about a Crips and Bloods docu-drama made 100 years from now. He said everyone in Compton would have a British accent because history is English for some reason. Couldn't un-see it. Almost everyone in CHERNOBYL is British.
I personally think that a good example of American accents being used in medieval setting is the Disney cartoon version of the Adventures of Robin Hood. In the film they almost seamlessly mix in southern American accents with English accents. It took me and my friends years to really notice.
Oh my goodness, you're right! I never thought about it till now. But it is interesting that all the main, "serious" characters have British accents. Except Little John.
If the fantasy is based on American tall tales, it would work. Or even a "western" feeling fantasy, it doesn't have to have cowboy hats or pistols, but a frontier, a man riding alone, a town tormented by bandits, etc. Or discovery, or taming the land. Japan can make Scifi and fantasy movies and they still feel like Samurai movies. Maybe it's the same with America and Westerns.
@@girl-fromthemoon Oh, totally! There are splashes of eastern mysticism in the Force, but Han Solo is a certified American space cowboy. And Luke is a farmboy from a frontier homestead (that even gets raided by "indians"). You could say the small personal spaceship is an evolution of the cowboy's horse and the detective/gangster's muscle car (which is an urban version of westerns), and the main plot is basically a mashup of the American Revolution and WW2.
A fair point, at least for fantasy that is not set in or inspired by some particular real-world setting. And of course the answer is that, otherwise, it would make things much harder on both the filmmakers and the audience.
So it can be digestible to audiences. If you wanna make something really hardcore fantasy. Entirely with a made up language that would be cool, but you would likely find only a very small audience who would dedicate themselves to learning the language. From there then there would be translations made so it could be more accessible, and for different dialects you'd have translators taking inspiration from English accents for more posh characters, and etc. You'd end up with it being exactly the same. TLDR; Because that's f-ing stupid you smartass
Even most medieval period films miss out on the fact that the languages of time were very different. If I were suddenly transported to 12th century England I'd find Middle English to be mostly incomprehensible and I'd have to learn to speak it like it were a foreign language because it essentially would be.
The same reason why people in fiction are omniglots who can communicate with anyone, regardless of if they're from a different country or a different planet.
@@The_Worst_Guy_Ever I read enough fiction to know this isn't always the case. There are such things as translators and go-betweens or learning a new language in fiction. Sometimes it's even a major focus of the story like in Enemy Mine.
I'd say, it's mostly conditioning: the vast majority of the English language media makes it so, forcing that as a convention, so a deviation from that sounds off. The fact that the term "fantasy" in English speaking circles often evokes specifically European inspired settings and concepts also makes the European form of the language sound "more natural" as a pairing. But that is also part of that conditioning, as the majority of the most popular fantasy worlds in the English speaking world draw far more from European ideas and settings than from other cultures.
Given the obsession modern fantasy like ROP has with diversifying medieval villages, I demand that we go all the way and include southerner elves. Honestly I kid but that would be kind of hilarious to hear "Ya'll dun goofed, I reckon" in a fantasy show.
Now I’m imagining an entire village of hobbits who talk like American hillbillies and I’m torn between laughing my ass off & thinking “hey this could actually work for real!”
For Tolkien specifically, since Sindarin shares a lot of sounds with Finnish, I want Finnish accented elves, with hints of Welsh for those who grew up speaking Quenya (which for some mind-melting reason is protrayed as all elves in RoP. That show gives me hives. 😡😑)
As a German speaker, THIS. Literally 90% of movies don't even bother and go for some bellowed snappy sounding nonsense interlaced with a few Jawohl! and Los!. Christoph Waltz was such a treat as probably the first German characters actually speaking proper German.
It's a bit difficult to do that if you're making a historical movie set a few thousand years ago. First off, nobody really knows for sure what they sounded like, and secondly, there aren't any natives of that area still alive to tell us. For instance, to be accurate to the location and era, the characters in Xena: Warrior Princess would have had to speak with the accents of ancient Macedonia, Greece, Egypt, Troy, numerous places in the Middle East, Latin (for the Rome storyline), American English (for the Indiana Jones spoof), Mongolian languages, various Slavic languages, and so on. Xena and Hercules were primarily made for the American and Canadian markets, so the showrunners made no effort to hide those accents. Lucy Lawless normally speaks with an Australian accent, but used an American accent. And the character in one of the clips in this video, Callisto, is Canadian. It's also difficult to do accurate location/era accents if your movie is set in some futuristic time. The David Lynch Dune movie in 1984 just let the actors use their normal accents, and this has led some fans to gripe about Duke Leto having a German accent, Lady Jessica having a British Accent, and Paul having an American accent. I just headcanon it as Jessica's accent being that of the planet she grew up on - Wallach IX. Duke Leto's accent is the one the nobility of the planet Caladan use, but Paul's accent isn't the same because he spends much of his time with tutors and servants. He would have picked up the accent of the people of lesser rank.
I'm Australian and I can do a convincing Southern/Midwestern accent (not so much a good general American accent for some reason, I could do it but I struggle to get into it because of how subtle some differences are easily missed but obvious when missed) which I honed from years of mimicking what I see from games and television. I think that any Australian with the lighter and nasal variant (as opposed to the deep Ocker variant) of our accent can learn to speak like an American with just a few days of coaching because plenty of us almost sound American until you hear us pronounce certain words like Cant (with is pronounced like "aren't") or anything with an R at the end (e. After pronounced as Afta).
Honestly, that's a pretty strange example now that I think about it. Neither the original author who wrote the books and the studio who adapted the Witcher into a game series are from the USA, are they?
@@Orange_Swirl Indeed. I spent the video thinking "Are we just assuming that 'fantasy' = medieval-European-inspired fantasy?" American accents are absolutely appropriate for something like The Wizard of Oz. (We haven't gotten a faithful adaptation of Baum's book, but if we did, I would fully expect it to have American accents.)
Robin Hood wouldn't have a modern English accent, because the modern English accent was exclusively for the upper class until the industrial revolution which took place after a few decades after the USA's founding, and his thing was kind of, stealing from the upper class as a protector of the proletariat.
Game of Thrones probably leaned so much into British English because Martin based it loosely on the War of the Roses, if I recall correctly. British English, and the varied accents, are also closely tied to class-based systems, whereas America was founded on egalitarianism and lacks that class distinction in its dialects. That means it is very effective at portraying both elegance and crudeness, depending on the accent used. American English can come off as casual, and maybe even sloppy, and isn't readily associated with structures such as monarchies, which are prevalent in much of fantasy. I do think a variety of English accents and dialects, including American, should be used to some extent in most fantasy that has varied cultures. I think such a thing adds to the atmosphere.
Now we need an american fantasy where the elves all sound like they're from Tennessee, the Dwarves are midwesterners, the Wizard's from Jersey.and the Dragon's from Texas.
C.S Lewis is not British. He is Irish. Belfast is not in Britain, it is in Ireland. Also he wasn't even in the UK at the time, as Belfast was not part of the UK back then.
I know it's sci fi, but Star Wars handled American and British accents well, with American accents signifying the outer rim of the galaxy and British accents at the core. I think American accents could work fine, but they should represent something specific.
Modern British English accents aren't any older. It's had a ton of sound changes too- in fact it's had more sound changes from pre colonial English than American English has. But both are still equally modern.
I find English accents for ancient Romans tiresome and pretentious. A holdover from Shakespeare and BBC productions I suppose. English accents really worked in The Death of Stalin though!
Most fantasy movies aren’t actually British accents - they’re Mid-Atlantic accent or Atlantian. Which is a mix of American and British accents popular in the US in the 30’s.
Kinda like saying "thou art" and "thy hast" instead of "you are" and "you have," or like saying "he/she/it hath" instead of "he/she/it has." That's definitely cool though
@@hanleylopezescano5977 I don't Know much Spanish at all, but I was recently comparing the conjugations of the various Romance languages against those of Latin, and in some tenses Spanish and Italian can get crazy close to the original Latin. I think the closest I saw so far was that the Latin imperfect tense of esse was only a few letters off from the Spanish imperfect of ser. Also the Latin perfect tense of esse is only a few letters off from the preterite tense of ser. Makes sense though.
Some other media does this as well. In Final Fantasy 6, there's a character who uses proper Middle-English pronouns (Thou/Thee and You/Ye). In Final Fantasy XIV, there was a character that spoke with an archaic Japanese accent in the original, so when they translated it to American, they weren't sure the best way, so they use a hybrid of very formal Modern English with a bit of Middle English. It's funny to people to the point it has been dubbed "Urianger speak" after the character Urianger who speaks it. The voice actor apparently has a lot of fun with it irl, too.
My personal counterpoint… Elder Scrolls, especially Cyrodiil, Western Skyrim, and the Forbear Cities of Hammerfell, could be a good place for an American accent. Those areas specifically have the same kind of paradoxical ruggedness and universality where an American accent would be a nice artistic touch. 🇺🇸
I can't remember how far I was into the second game in the recent God of War series when I realized that the Greek titular character, his son, and the entire pantheon of Norse gods all had American accents. Odin was performed by Richard Schiff in his distinctly New York accent. But all the performances managed to strike exactly the right tone, comfortably honest, or grandiose stage-like as needed. Set in a world of gods, the game is as fantastical as it gets, and yet the accents never feel out of place. The only exception is the character Mimir, who has a Scottish accent any dwarf would be proud of. He's supposedly a former adviser of Odin, but as the story unfolds, it's hinted at that he was once Robin Goodfellow from the fairy court of Oberon and Titania, as depicted in the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night's Dream. So make of that what you will. Also, I think everyone can agree Doug Cockle's performance for the english translation of the Witcher games works just fine, despite him using his distinctly American accent. I think there's a way to do it, threading the needle between not too modern and not too performative. I think Cavill made the right choice in using an english accent, though he was a fan of the Witcher 3, and borrowed heavily from Cockle. But in future english adaptations, I'd love it if Geralt's famously foreign-sounding Rivian accent was interpreted as Polish. It's such a great, underappreciated accent. I think it's insane that fantasy films limit themselves to either British and American accents. There are loads more options to choose form.
@@rottensquid I appreciate you. And your insight. Also I worked for a Polish woman for years and if Cavill could've pulled it off I would've loved that shit
@@karatekoala4270 Not Cavill, but thanks to DC Projekt and the Netflix show, the character is now in the cultural zeitgeist. So I expect we haven't seen the last of the Witcher in the film medium.
Geralt, Triss, Lambert, Vesemir and Eskel all have American accents and they all fit in the fantasy world fine. It really is how the accent is performed and the strength of the dialogue and writing in general.
Accents don’t bother me. It’s dialogue. I loved Hercules:The Legendary Journeys, but the dialogue was often waaayy too modern. And that was back in the late ‘90s/early 2000s. Goodness knows how it would be written now!
I have no idea what some people are talking about these days, because they don't use complete sentences, and what they do use often only has half the words (as in the front part of the word, with an "o" tacked on).
I actually dont mind American accents in a fantasy setting if they're featured in a specific region or culture, while the others have British English and other accents
@@Arthur_Deadeye_Morgan If the character is intentionally made familiar, that sets him apart from the rest of the world, which, being fantasy, is supposed to be strange and foreign.
There are fantasy genres where the American accent works better, I think most Sci-fi fantasy feels more natural with an American accent. But it is weird with a more Europe centered setting to have a "non-European" accent. As well as anything Lovecraftian (since so much of that universe takes place in New England.)
I mean... it doesn't sound 'natural' if you're not American. As you say, setting-specific stories might naturally call for different accents - various British accents for Harry Potter, New England accents for Lovecraft, etc - but for anything set in an invented setting, whatever the sub-genre, no accent you choose is more or less natural (or correct) than any other. I do have a bias against American accents in epic fantasy, but I acknowledge that it isn't really rational, and I don't see non-American accents as the natural option to go with. I just have a subjective preference.
One glaring exception is Doctor Who. Whoever cast Eric Roberts as the Master in the 1996 movie was a world-class idiot of the first order. That character should NEVER have an American accent, any more than the Doctor should.
I find animated fantasy shows and movies are much more likely to have a diverse range of accents, like the dragon prince using different accents for different races of elves, how to train you dragon having American and Scottish accents and Arcane having mostly American accents but also some British ones
Unless its the dark tower so that invalidates your entire argument and they say the apalachian accent is actually closer to how elizabethen english actually sounded
Ironically that's how lots of English people used to sound a long time ago. The American Accent is derived from an accent similar to the contemporary West Country accent (which to this day in England has a bit of a "cowboy/pirate" vibe to it) that was prevalent before Cockney influence spread outside of the London area (and before received pronunciation was adopted by more of the upper class and elements trickled down).
@@johnnyjohn-johnson7738 Very much this. People don't realize American English (at least some accents/dialects of it) is/are closer to early Modern English than the British accent. Due to being initially more isolated, the American versions didn't change as rapidly through the centuries and are closer, not farther, from medieval English. Not only that, but many times, characters aren't even speaking "English" in the first place. It's more like we have a Universal Translator that is translating their language to something we can understand anyway. It's like how all the Galactic Empire people in Star Wars speak British English despite the setting not only being very likely before British ever came into being, but in another galaxy completely culturally isolated from it anyway.
@@SubduedRadical I don't think that Star Wars is set in the distant past of anything resembling our reality, I think that it's a completely separate alternate universe and that the British accent comes from Coruscant humans having their own version of Great Britain in their own distant past. I see "A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far Far Away" as coming from the perspective of a Jedi scribe rather than from our perspective.
@@johnnyjohn-johnson7738 "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" implies it IS set in our universe. There's also a non-canon/old canon story that Earth actually came from there, it was transported here in the distant past (apparently, Indiana Jones finds Han's skeleton on it), though that's pretty non-canon at this point. But "a galaxy far away" would be in this same universe, most likely, as you'd describe a parallel universe in a different way than "far away", even if "far away" might be loosely accurate. Why would a Jedi scribe describe HIS OWN galaxy as far away? . I did like how one of the UA-cam creators that does some mocking videos (the ones about Anakin's thesis being on the tragedy of Darth Plageus the Wise studies) about this. He has Anakin say something about a story with "gen-is say quois" (sorry, I don't know French, but you can sound that out to get the phrase) and the Palpatine character says to him "Wait...what language was that just now?!" mocking that French shouldn't be a language in Star Wars (nor should English) and we're just interpreting it in our own language as viewers of the movie.
When I was a kid, I loved watching the old 1950s Hollywood historical epics, especially the Roman Empire ones. Even then, as a Canadian who spoke both a peculiar old-fashioned variety of Canadian French, and an equally peculiar far northern variety of Canadian English, I was very aware of the different accents used in films. One thing I noticed was that in all the Roman Empire films, the Senators and Emperors and other bigwigs in togas all had RP British accents, or the Shakespearian Actor accent, the legionaries and other macho characters had Midwestern American accents, and the slaves and peasants had lower class UK accents. Today's fantasy films seem to have a more complicated version of this convention. Possibly the most successful fantasy films of all time were filmed in New Zealand, and many of the bit parts were played by Kiwis. But can you imagine a big fantasy film in which all the main characters had Kiwi accents?! I would go see it for sure, and love it just for that, but the whole world would probably be in shock.
I liked warcraft growing up because of the American accents. British accents sounded too cliche or corny and earthly. The American accents made the fantasy aspect feel different
That's the irony. We've been conditioned to think of the British English accents to be how people in the 1500s spoke, but American English is actually closer to pre colonial English than modern British English is, although it's also had a fair share of sound changes, just less drastic ones. It's only because we associate Britain with monarchy and America with post-feudal that we think the accents are correlated to time, which is reinforced by the media over and over again, even though they aren't. Language doesn't care when governments divide into sovereign nations
This video is like when you've got a paragraph worth of content, but a two page assignment. It's not that complex. Fantasy that's set a thousand years ago isn't going to use a dialect developed 200 years ago. Modern European English may not be accurate either, but it's right enough for collective society. The Harry Potter reference is moot. That's literally set in modern Europe.
Elves have snobby, upper-class, "my old Southern family has generational wealth" (don't ask how we got it...) accents. Dwarves are Appalachian: work-hard play-hard mountain folk. Orcs are Texan: big and seem like they have guns. A human fishing town sounds Cajun, probably.
Is it the same with Spanish language? Like an American fantasy movie and the English is in British accent, is the dub in Spanish like Spanish accent (from Spain) and not Mexican or Hispanic-American? Even in video games too, I’ve read something that the dub in Final Fantasy XVI is in “Latin American Spanish”, and some Spanish gamers kind of didn’t like it as the Latino accent didn’t fit the high fantasy setting.
Historically most things dubbed in Spanish were dubbed in "Spain Spanish" (ie Madrid/Northern Castille), though some other things like Disney movies were mainly dubbed in Mexican Spanish, then as time went on, the Mexican and Spain Spanish dubs have been the most common,the main reasons is that for Spain Spanish as Spain is the richer country, companies feel that it is a more reliable market, and for Mexican Spanish, well, Mexico is just next to the US. For the Final Fantasy thing, that series is very big in Spain among 80s and 90s people (some guys are actual fanatics), so of course there is a feeling of betrayment, though I haven't investigated if FFXVI actually has "Spain Spanish" dub. The thing is that fantasy here is mostly foreing products that we consume, so there isn't an agreed upon accent that fits fantasy settings, I personally would say that Galician accent (not the same thing as Galician language btw) would be the most accurate for castle-esque fantasy, while Seville/Western Andalucia accent would be very fitting in Renaissance/Exploration age fantasy that is becoming more popular today.
@@DonPedroman Wow, that's really interesting, the different accents in Spain (Galician and Andalucian accents) for high fantasy/middle age films/series. I've got to ask, if what was the accents used in the Spanish dub of Game of Thrones? Did Game of Thrones spanish dub also used like the one you said, Galician and Andalucian accents? I would also like to add (more in video games), the original Resident Evil 4 (2005) received major criticisms because the "Spanish" voice actors that voiced Spanish Characters (the game takes place in Spain) sounded like from Mexico or Latin American. In Resident Evil 4 Remake (2023), it was praised because they finally used Spanish accent for the voice actors. Although I'm not familiar what regional accent, as I don't know where the Resident Evil 4 takes place in Spain, if it's in the northern region (Galicia), or somewhere else like Asturias or Catalonia region.
No not really, normally series and movies have two Spanish translations, one for Spain and the other for Latin America. The Latin American one uses a sort of neutral accent that doesn't give away any specific regionality, the Spanish one on the other hand uses Spanish slang and accent, in both cases whenever have a character speaking in an old fashioned way they use phrases and terms that are considered old fashioned, instead of changing their accent. Most people prefer Latin American dubs to Spanish ones, even a lot of people within Spain.
American fantasy needs to take advantage of the early colonial period, when swords and armor were still around in some form and make something out of that.
Yeah. Stone castles and arming swords are medieval, but baroque style palaces grand balls, and sword duels all existed in early America around the same time as Europe.
What about the Hunger Games, Maze Runner, and Divergent? I guess maybe they wouldn't be considered fantasy to some. But if you but Bright on the fantasy list I'd put those. Anyway, those where all killer movies with American accents, for the most part
American accents don't fit fantasy because fantasy is essentially "Old World-Fiction": Dragons, knights, kings and what not are deeply rooted in the Old World, that's why an American accent is immersion breaking. Just as a German or RP accent would be immersion breaking in something about the Chupacabra or the many horrors of Appalachia.
But that is conflating real world history with fantasy. Most fantasy didn't take place in Europe or Asia or America. But those influences can still exist in the setting. Also, literally every culture in the world has some form of dragon in it's history. They not a strictly European thing.
@@karatekoala4270 "Old World" includes everything from Ireland to Japan and from Iceland to the tip of Africa. American accents feel off in Fantasy because Anglo-America, for lack of a better word, does not have a past.
But if a production of Shakespeare was put on, the accents in the play would be British despite hamlet being set in Denmark or Julius Caesar set in Rome. I think the point is it’s down to association, Jake gylllenhaal didn’t get cast in LOTR because of his accent.
Why do Dvarves sound Scottish:
ua-cam.com/video/JqR7pWcZVeY/v-deo.html
4:20? If it's that the author is British, think Neil gaiman, gaimen? The Sandman series, is the name, Stardust with Michelle phifer.?
Why do witches sound Welsh?
ever play pillars of eternity 2? southern accent fits okay with one of the race there
I'm Scottish, it just fits 😂
Because everyone is bashing them on Tolkien 's dwarves and the language he created for them. Heavy Celtic influence. In my own stories, the dwarves are the progeny of Bes, African dwarf god.
People who think American dialects lack diversity are only familiar with American news broadcasts. There are a ton of accents just in the South. In New York City alone, it seems like every borough has its own dialect.
Most of the world knows America only from Hollywood.
Which is weird.
They think most Americans talk like people from Los Angeles.
@@DreamsAudio Just LA? C'mon everyone knows there are four american accents: surfer, cowboy, al capone, and none
THB though, Ive been to New York, Boston, Minnesota, parts of the south, and grew up in chicago--all those "stereotypical" regional dialects (mostly seen in movies) have practically died out except in the *south*
For the Minnesota accent, its alot softer than portrayed in movies and sounds closer to Canadian accents (again with few Canadians save for Jordan Peterson even having that accent anymore), in Boston, I ran into a few people with the Boston accent. In New york I only knew *one* guy--and he was from Brooklyn--while *eveyone* else I've ever ran into just sounded like they were from the midwest.
In Chicago, the 34 years I've lived here, *no* *one* has ever had the chicago movie accent, and speaks standard American/midwest dialect.
Ive yet to visit Louisiana and see the situation there...
As far as the south, it seems like it's intensity is either heavier or softer among different speakers, but not really "differnent" in dialect, per se
British accents are also grafted onto shows and movies about Roman history. I wanna see and hear Julius Caesar speaking with his hands and having an authentic Italian accent.
I'd like to see one where he has a Jersey accent
Romans may be from Italy, but are very far from modern Italian in every way shape and form.
The hypocrisy of this video is insane.
@@zanicar4087 Italians have as close to Romans as Americans to British
it would be a Latin accent, far removed from modern Italian. There are people who still study Latin though and might have an idea of how to portray it
Goblins talk like 1930s american gangsters in World of Warcraft, and it fits them perfectly 👌🏼
Trolls talk like Jamaicans. It works well.
So they have an Italian accent
Orcs and humans are basically americans too
@@bigredwolf6no they have an upper eastern us accent, it's not the same as Italian
@@bobthedestroyer6205 Orcs not really they sound more like their voice than their accent but some humans for sure
Harry Potter with a British accent doesn't make sense because it's fantasy. It makes sense because it's literally set in a fantasy version of modern day England.
A Stormlight Archive adaptation should have a Korean accent for most of the characters, Szeth being a notable exception.
Even if most Rosharans have epicanthic folds, doesn't mean they should have Asian accents . . . We don't really know what their language sounds like aside from their naming conventions.
Rosharans are also brown skinned rather than fair like Koreans and other East Asians.
Has Sanderson mentioned that Rosharans are based on Korea? I mean it’s an entire planet with multiple different peoples and cultures. The Alethi have never struck me as particularly Korean, nor Herdazians or most of the other races. Why should they sound Korean?
@@Kaloffee They're not based on any real world cultures. Sanderson has said that the closest real ethnicities that the humans on Roshar resemble are South Asians and Polynesians. The exceptions are the Shin who would look European, Veden who would look 'mixed' to us with fair skin and red hair but also epicanthic folds (Like Bjork and other Scandis with epicanthic folds), and the Natan who are blue skinned and Iriali who are golden. They're also all extremely tall - Kaladin is 7ft which is only above average for an Alethi, and Shallan is short at 6ft.
But that's only physically, culturally they are nothing like any real world cultures.
@@vannplaysgamespoorly1772 interesting! I’ve never actually heard Sanderson comment on what the Rosharans look like, so in my head I’ve always seen the Alethi as relatively Arabic looking, and the Shin as typically Southeast Asian. Thanks for the info
"American Accents don't fit in Fantasy."
Me: *Makes a high fantasy set in the Wild West.*
I am afraid that's not how it works, chief.
@@Fortunate_Fennec The genre is literally called "fantasy." We can literally create any kind of world we want, with any kind of magic, mythology, supernatural beings, yadda yadda.
It can work however we want it to work.
The wild west is boring and over done.
@@huguesdepayens807
The Wild West with FANTASY is overdone??? There’s NONE, dude
@@huguesdepayens807you could also say European fantasy is overdone
The irony that the modern "british accent" is younger than the "american accent."
lol, yeah, this. Pointed it out and saw it in a few replies, but American English was initially more isolated, so changed less rapidly than Britain's English dialects and accent, so is closer to medieval English...not that either really is. Middle English and Old English sound nothing like Modern English at this point anyway.
Technically both are equally young; accents evolve continuously, so British and American accents have more or less equally evolved from their last common ancestor. If you listen to recordings of either General American or Received Pronunciation accents from the early 20th century (the ancestors of modern stereotypical American and British accents, respectively), you'll find that both have some pretty big distinctions from modern stereotypical American and British accents (I say stereotypical since obvs there's a lot of regional variation in both British and US accents, and I'm just talking about the ones most people mean when they say "British accent" or "American accent").
The stereotypical "American accent" has preserved certain older features (like rhoticity, where R's on the ends of words are pronounced), while the stereotypical "British accent" is more divergent (picking up new features like non-rhoticity and the trap-bath split, where the vowels in certain words like "bath" shifted from an A like in "trap" to a long "Ah" sound), which has led to the idea that it's an older accent, but it also has lots of new features (like, at the time of the American Revolution it was still common in upper-class American accents to roll some R's, and the sound we pronounce as "Ah-ee" today, like in the words "I," "Eye," and "My," was instead pronounced more like "Uh-ee"). If you went back in time to the American Revolution, people from London and New York would have pretty similar accents, but those accents would sound a lot more like an unfamiliar regional British accent than a modern American accent!
Overall, the West Country accent (the accent famously associated with Pirates and used by Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies) is probably the closest English-language accent to the accents you would have heard in London and America at the time of American independence, though even it isn't exact - no accent is truly "older" than any other on the whole, though some have more old features!
@@SomasAcademy It'd be nice to see a list of all the changes and compare them across dialects. For example, US Southern (Southeast) and Texan (Texas) accents still do some of those things you say that American accents don't do.
I think the issue may be you're using London and Midwestern (the most "neutral" American dialect that is the midpoint between all the others), where the regional dialects may be more different than you think. And some of those aren't niche dialects that are highly localized with very few speakers. Southern + Texan is easily a full ~1/4th of American English speakers and a land area larger than many nations.
Such a good discussion in this. Thanks!
There are many different British accents as well. Wessex accent sounds similar to US southern accent.
I think when it’s European based fantasy meaning dragons and knights etc. It makes more sense to have British or European accents. However, the one major exception would be the Wizard of Oz that is an American author, and the lore/setting is not Euro centric based. it is uniquely American fantasy. The Midwest, Kansas, farms, scarecrow, witches (think salem), woodsman the wizard who is really an inventor/politician/con artist. That’s in the Wizard of Oz. The accents are American and it makes more sense. It would feel awkward to have British accents in that world. Even though I think Glinda is the only character that I can think of the top of my head that has one.
That makes sense since neither North America nor South America had a medieval european period as it's written in fantasy. The same with spanish and portuguese. You would have to write another kind of fantasy.
@@AlphaCentauri-b2o Spain and Portugal are in Europe and had a whole European medieval period. Check a geography/history book for once.
@@orzotubephi9328 Of course they had. That's what I said
Apparently they’re Brits out in Winkie Country. 😉
I mean, they can’t cast a handsome prince and have him not be posh. British = Hollywood shorthand for royal or rich.
But yes the OG Oz books are some of the precious little classic American whimsical fairy tale-like literatureAmericans can lay claim to. Most of our children’s literature or literature in general doesn’t feel like it fits in with Alice in wonderland.
They do?
That's like saying British accents don't belong in Star Wars. There's a point you have to do a little suspension of disbelief and accept that things are just what they are. British accent don't really make sense in fantasy, either, when you realize a lot of old fantasy base stories pre-date the British accent EXISTING, or at least existing as it does today. Old English sounds nothing like modern English with a British accent, for example, and Middle English doesn't really, either. Not to mention that, as linguists and folks that study these things have pointed out, (some) American accents are closer to early Modern English than British accents are due to cultural drift. By being more isolated initially, US/American English has changed less over the last several centuries.
So this is literally entirely a personal perception "feels" thing with people that is actually the opposite of reality, as the British accent is actually more alien to a fantasy setting than an American one.
But I tend to treat it like I treat Star Trek: Rule of Universal Translator. That I'm hearing it in my brain's interpretation of their language, not that these people are speaking Modern English at all. : )
Interestingly enough it seems that the American accent is the preferred accent for Sci-Fi. Which makes sense because America has always been a very forward looking country. Where English authors take inspiration from their medieval history, American authors take inspiration from the technological advances of America.
Dr Who tho
Dr. Who spends a lot of time in the past, too.
@@sydneyharbour-bridges8090 cool, you found one example, just like this video showed examples of American accents in fantasy.
Yeah, the history of how America became the center of technology is fascinating, with the world wars devastating Europe, before then the language of science was German, with Britain as the most developed economy. But after the first war, then the fleeing of intellectuals before the second, saw America’s ascendancy, where by the end of the war, America had a more advanced missile program than the Germans despite focusing on bombers, after the war they would attract German scientists, not to help them, but to deny them to the Soviets. The Cold War saw the British empire and Soviet Union attempt to match the US militarily and technologically, but that only led them to neglect their civilian sectors, which led them both to collapse. Whereas the Americans by virtue of their wealth and natural geographical advantages didn’t have to care to focus on one thing, they could develop their light and heavy industry, agriculture, military, and technology all at once.
Nothing says, “I only know America through Hollywood,” quite like saying we all have pretty much the same accent. But i suppose i can’t complain, because i have only known of England’s norFern accent for a few years.
You're right. It's not one, it's like six or... seven.
There are certainly a variety of American accents but in Britain you can have notably different accents with like 10 miles of eachother. With a good ear for accents you can figure out exactly where someone is from and there social status just by listening to them.
@@oyoo3323 Uh...it's well more than six or seven. And that's BEFORE getting to the very localized and small population ones, like whatever the hell that thing is that Maine has going on up there which I can barely understand. Even some of the localized ones are pretty huge with massive populations of speakers, like New York accent.
@@SubduedRadical apologies, I suppose the word "accent" is rather vague and ill-defined. What I should've said was dialects; and to that end, it's perhaps ten, and that's if we're being generous.
If we speak of dialects, the Southeastern variants ones can be seen as just two dialects: Texan (1) and Southeastern (2). Southwestern (3) is one, which can be thought of as basically Californian. Minnesotan (4) can be counted, although it is functionally an extension of the Central Canadian dialect. You were right to point out that the northeast is where there's the most diversity, which is to be expected given that's where the language has been in the country for the longest, so let's add Northeastern (5) to the list. Alaskan (6) I can't speak on much (so do give me more information if you can), but I'm just going to assume it is sufficiently different due to it's Geographic seperation from the rest of the country. That now leaves the Standard (7), which, though was constructed to include features from all over the country, very clearly uses what I belive your folk call the "Midwest"'s speech as a basis, so while they may be multiple accents, they're easily considered the same dialect; this is also where I should bring up that the language as spoken throughout nearly the entire rest of the country, while certainly can be said to be many accents, is simply too similar to the Standard to be considered another dialect (for that matter, I know a fair few Linguists argue that Californian is insufficiently different too to be considered a dialect unique from the Standard. Besides that, I can think of AAV (8), which though derived from the Southeastern dialect, is easily sufficiently different to qualify as a dialect (although I think ethnolect would be a more precise term in its case).
If there are any others you can bring up, please do. If I didn't mention it, it is likely for one of the following reasons:
1) I don't know of it.
2) It has too few speakers, thus is obscure.
3) It is insufficiently different from the ones I mentioned above to qualify as a distinct dialect (even if it can be defined as an "accent").
4) It is antequated, even if well-known (such as Mid-Atlantic English).
5) It is actually too different to be considered the same language at all, thus is perhaps a creole (such as Gullah).
@@oyoo3323 I suppose it's how distinct one considers things and where one draws the lines between accent, dialect, and how many speakers and/or geographical area one requires to mark one as distinct.
The US is a pretty big place. The US and China are tied for 3rd place in the world for land area (behind 2nd Canada and 1st Russia), and the US is third for population (behind India and China with India seemingly taken the 1st place spot now over China in 2nd). It also is a very culturally, ethnically, and racially diverse country, which also has linguistic influences to match that diversity.
So it shouldn't be a surprise it has a high amount of dialects, accents, and languages across its peoples and territory.
If you look at it in the most "10,000 foot" level, then around 10, yeah. But that's like saying England has 3. Sure, one could make such an argument...but at that point it's so lacking in nuance that it seems a mockery.
It's mostly because high fantasy media is mostly made by Americans, mostly for the American audience. High fantasy, more than any other, relies on evoking a sense of foreign-ness and unfamiliarity that one just does _not_ hear from an accent that sounds like the guy next door. So, directors chose foreign British accents to accomplish that.
That's how it began, anyway.
From there, the trope of British accents being more posh and "fantasy-fitting" developed. We _think_ British accents are more fit for fantasy, simply because we've been _conditioned_ to think that, due to British accents being used in fantasy settings.
Of course, there's exceptions as well. The Elder Scrolls series has always a wide range of accents, but typically follows the rule of assigning American accents to humans and British ones to elves (as well as Skyrim's use of Scandinavian actors for the native Nord people). That gives the humans a sense of familiarity to the American audience, while the elves feel foreign and "different" from humans; a major plot point in the series.
@@skyscall it's mostly because all the fantasy media is based on European medieval mythology
And English/British is the only language an American understands so its only logical to use English, Scottish or Irish accents in fantasy media
Or English with a Germanic or Slavic accent
It's a good explanation.
Myself I never ever felt any different by an American or British accent in fantasy, though being Polish, neither sound like the guy next door.
But it makes a lot of sense from this American POV. If you hear British accents in fantasy since childhood, it's gonna build a strong association.
I agree. I didn't want to see Guy Ritchie's asking Arthur adaptation even though I love his films. The reason why is because the costumes, dialogue, and hair styles in the trailers looked to American and modern. Jamie Fox with a shaved head and short, meticulously groomed facial hair just doesn't evoke medieval Europe for me.
very true, likewise, elves sounding more "uppity" and posh has for a long time been tied to british accents
@@Trickaz94No, it's none of that. It's exactly what rhe original comment said 😅
The problem is the generic American accent doesn't usually fit the setting. But, there isn't just one American accent. The Elder Scrolls games use American voice actors to great effect imo, because it's usually an attenuated or almost transatlantic American accent. It may not even be the accent, but the delivery of the lines.
Someone like Linda Kenyon for example, who voiced the female Dark Elves in TES, had a very distinct, clear, non-generic American accent which was perfect in that setting and role.
I often think that theatrically trained American actors like Armand Assante would be perfect for fantasy roles, and would be a great Marvel superhero villain. He in particular has an incredible range, but a distinctly New York accent.
I think British actors are consciously and unconsciously more theatrical than most American actors. I think if more appropriate American actors were chosen for these roles, we would see no difference in the quality.
I was about to say that in TES there are a lot of American accents mixed in with British and Scandinavian accents. Even in the Witcher, if you play with the English language on, they speak with American accents (like Geralt). Finally, I guess it’s not technically fantasy, but I find it funny that in STALKER 2 everyone says to just play with Ukrainian instead of English. All of the English voice actors sound ridiculous being in the middle of an Eastern European wasteland and are all Scottish for some reason (besides Skif)
This.
Senior American accents seem to fit/go unnoticed. Greybeard Master Arngeir has a Canadian accent(American) in Skyrim.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 had voice actors from every English speaking country, for the different lands of the fantasy world
i love the va for redguards in oblivion and morrowind (he was also cyrus in reduard :D!!) never felt he was out of place, brittish acents are just a trope,
that said i hate tullius his acent doesnt fit or maybe its the way he delivers it, he just sounds like a typical american getting mad about politics, sure the other va sounded ameican but he fits in the world, tullius sounds capital A american says racist shit at thanksgiving and complains about imigrants lol
Probably because all the old fairytales/mythologies we're used seeing on screen came and come from Europe
Well, that's a great start, but we need to stick to that line of inquiry until we find a real final answer. It might have something to do with the American Revolution.
remember that not everyone is literate enough to read the American Revolutionaries' documents (and this is because those documents are the first pieces of a new genre of secular writing, which gives religious extremists "pep" without making it awkward if their little brothers can't read). They only read religious texts before the revolution, and they always felt alone. They were "trapped" in their small groups and had to obey their oldest brother. Why bother learning how to SPEAK at all? Speaking was invented simply because Mankind wanted his communities to be able to conduct court trials, should the need arise. So that's why we call the US by the name of its continent, America". Because it has no name, no words, no speaking, and certainly no writing. So how the HECK CAN YOU EXPECT THERE TO BE A UNITED NATIONS which THEY HAVE THE ABILITY TO ORCHESTRATE? They are barely even by our sides nowadays, as members of humanity. They are also not even like the goats which we slaughter for meat. The goats are being supervised. The Americans are not. They have "planted a seed" of their revolution in "Turkistan" or whatever, just like every other place on earth which may or may not exist (it's not important whether it exists or not). Maybe it's time for them to grow up and become like their big brother. Did you know that I gave him that scar?
Yeah he literally says that in the video.
rofl because everything in europe is english? ok make it all fantasy non english. that would be more accurate
@@seanrowshandel1680 Please take your meds before hopping on the internet. Would do you favors.
It’s funny because the first fantasy story that sort of kicked off the modern Fantasy novel tread was essentially American. The Wizard of Oz is American fantasy. Not to mention Conan the Barbarian’s author Robert E Howard was a Southerner and Conan was a huge pioneer in the Sword and Sorcery genre.
Princess of Mars... American. Mark Twain wrote a Conneticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court. plenty of American fantasy before Tolkien and most fairy tales aren't even British.
American English isn't "new". Our country is young, yes, but our language is a direct continuation of the speech of the original english settlers. British English and American English are equally as old.
We actually have some really old dialects in some parts of the US. Some of them sound weird because they are closer to the past than the present.
british english is technically older
@borplorp the dominant british and american accents are both young, and trace their phonetics to the same time period; the radio and what diction works over radio and what does not; and the diction of english filtered by what worked with radio technology influenced those who listened and spread
@borplorp It's literally well studied and documented that American/Canadian English are more similar to pre-colonial English than modern British English is. Both have gone through sound changes, but American/Canadian English went through less drastic changes than British English.
There's no such thing as either being "older" than the other. One is more similar to the older version, but both are equally modern
There's a lot of very, very distinct American accents and dialects (Gulluh Geechee, Tidewater, Cajun Creole English). But they are probably too distinct for most people outside the US to understand. They are also very difficult to get right. I almost never here a really spot on Cajun accent on screen
Fun fact, Gullah Geechee and other African American dialects are so grammatically and phonetically distinct from other English varieties that a lot of linguists consider them essentially a separate language. Especially since there's a ton of variation even within these varieties.
@@arielgalles2107 wouldn't surprise me, we got our own dialects of Spanish, French, German so why not throw more languages into the mix. they are all 100% American and deserve official support from the gov and businesses.
It doesn’t help that a strong Cajun accent is nigh incomprehensible to anyone who ISN’T Cajun
@@OR56 chaw bruh
technically speaking even modern British english isn't same as spoken in medieval times as old english, even the english of Henry the 8th is nearly incomprehensible nowadays.
I am part of a local Shakespeare group, and even Shakespearean English is quite different from modern English
4:18 - Also, I will point out that Harry Potter actually takes place in real life UK, where it stands to reason there would be actual British accents.
Ridiculous. Appatently English accent also fit ancient Romans and Greeks too. Oh, and let's not forget Modern Russian too.
Enemy at the Gates rofl. Aye g'day comrade govna!
There's people directing actors playing Russian characters to speak w a British accent???? What??? First time hearing abt it
@carimeslockdownedtree2654 Chernobyl by HBO, Anna Karenina 2012
@carimeslockdownedtree2654 There are also a lot of English accents in The Death of Stalin.
Personally I prefer people to use their natural accents as opposed to doing a terrible foreign accent.
There's so many American accents that people from other countries (and even some Americans) don't know about. Some sound totally unique and would fit great for fantasy. Even in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area there are over 5 accents and even "sub accents". I was talking to an Ethiopian guy just the other day whose only been in America for a year who said he can understand white Americans from DC better than black Americans in the area because they speak slower and use words he recognizes from his English classes, while black Americans from the area speak very fast and use many words and phrases he's never heard of or seen in text books, almost like another language. I'm mixed race and grew up in three different states so my accent is an interesting blend, and a lot of other Americans and some foreigners ask me what country I'm from because my accent doesn't sound like a typical American accent, I've also been told I should narate books for audible or kindle because I sound like someone from a fantasy book. So American accents can be cool for fantasy, just depends on the accent.
The Cajun accent from Gambit in Deadpool and Wolverine is underrated. Would love more media with that accent
Met a guy when I was in the Navy from Maine who told me about Maine's accent. He then demonstrated it. It's pretty wild such a relatively small, low population state can have such a distinct accent, yet the people from there can also talk in "normal, understandable" English. I'm from Texas but grew up on the border with Mexico, so I don't really have a strong Southern or Texas accent (the two are not the same, btw), and people have said before I sound like I'm from the Midwest and should narrate books or the like since I have "the neutral American accent" people like for news anchors and such since it's simultaneously the closest to every other dialect, meaning it's the easiest "common" form of American English that the most people can easily understand.
@@SubduedRadicalI grew up in Georgia, as did my mother who raised me, but her parents were both from up north, so we both speak in a more general form of speech. Maybe it was my city’s large military presence, but most of my classmates didn’t really have a regional accent growing up. The longer I stay around here, the more it seems the Southern accent is in decline, with all the Northerners moving south and the population of rural areas consistently dropping.
I feel like British accents are better for fantasy and American accents are good for action movies
they also work well in sci fi or space fantasy. we can easily imagine american accents existing in the future, it just feels off when it's trying to portrait the past
@ very true
Jason Statham has entered the chat.
They do? That's like saying British accents don't belong in Star Wars. There's a point you have to do a little suspension of disbelief and accept that things are just what they are. British actions don't really make sense in fantasy, either, when you realize a lot of old fantasy base stories pre-date the British accent EXISTING, or at least existing as it does today. Old English sounds nothing like modern English with a British accent, for example, and Middle English doesn't really, either. Not to mention that, as linguists and folks that study these things have pointed out, (some) American accents are closer to early Modern English than British accents are due to cultural drift. By being more isolated initially, US/American English has changed less over the last several centuries.
So this is literally entirely a personal perception "feels" thing with people that is actually the opposite of reality, as the British accent is actually more alien to a fantasy setting than an English one.
But I tend to treat it like I treat Star Trek: Rule of Universal Translator. That I'm hearing it in my brain's interpretation of their language, not that these people are speaking Modern English at all. : )
where you do get that notion from?
It can absolutely work. Just look at JK Simmons’ work in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Also, American English isn’t “new”. It’s just a different fork of the same English.
Literally the first thing I thought of, like “umm, counterpoint: Ketheric motherfucking Thorm!” lmao
I have heard Brits say American movie villains have English accents because the US has an anti-British streak. This is not true. If you want a villain, give him an American accent like Darth Vader. Vader adds a pseudo-English accent to be taken seriously, but he is voiced by an American. The Emperor has a real English accent because he is the real power. He is to be taken very seriously. Note that the only person below the Emperor that Vader ever takes seriously is Governor Tarkin, who is very English. Americans don't take themselves seriously. They are more comfortable in the role of the upstart rebel like Luke, who challenges authority. Nothing sounds more authoritative to an American than an English accent. And that goes for authoritative ancient wisdom, too. Obi-Wan Kenobi is on the side of good, and English.
Sounds like a class distinction perhaps? Seems like the American working class has a stronger hold on the culture here and historically view the power structure as being rooted in the old world
@@beefsuperemeMaybe. Americans also know what Old Europe thinks about them, that Americans are dumb. And that accent is associated with being dumb. Americans aren't dumb, they know what they sound like to Europeans. Americans also like the idea of streetwise smarts. They like to see themselves as the person who gets things done, not talks it to death with "pretty" words.
When will we get a fantasy villain that sounds like Frasier Crane?
@@Twisted_Logic Sideshow Bob..?
Sorry i can't reply it keeps dumping my replies
8:06 this part I find really funny, because to Americans it’s almost the exact opposite. For British accents it’s basically just the three mentioned here, but I could place where you live in the U.S. down to the state in just a conversation or two. It’s all about what we’re used to lol
There are three mentioned here because they didn’t mention all the other accents. US has 42. UK has 56. Despite being 40 plus times bigger in land mass, US does not have more accents than the UK linguistically
Yeah, when I (American) was a kid, I definitely thought there were 3 British accents- English, Scottish, Irish.
But when I was in middle/high school I got into a lot of BBC shows and now even I can tell Manchester, upper class London, cockney, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham and York apart, as well as Welsh, and I can piece apart North Irish from other Irish accents. I still can't quite separate Scottish accents, but I haven't been watching nearly as much British media as I used to.
Auditory phonetics is a much bigger deal than we give it credit for, but it's so engrained in our lives that we don't often realize how much. I had roommates in college who couldn't hear the difference between what I was saying and how they were pronouncing it, which I heard as being very wrong. There was a whole thing in one of my linguistics classes where a guy from New England was trying to demonstrate that there IS a difference between "caught" and "cot" but majority of the class couldn't hear the difference because our dialects don't use a different vowel there. I barely could because I'd been in a different phonetics class the semester before and parsing out vowels that are very similar was a whole ordeal.
It's the main reason why people's pronunciation of new languages gets better with time. It's not just your mouth that needs training, your ears need training to be able to process that the sounds are different to replicate better.
So it totally makes sense that neither group recognizes very many accents in the other, unless you've been picking up on patterns from exposure
American dialects lack diversity? What? Somebody has clearly never heard American English outside of movies or TV. Most media relies on a "standard" Midwestern accent. But that sounds nothing like a New England accent. Lower Alabama has a lilt to its accent that would be perfect for elves. Cajun almost isn't even English. You could make a fantasy movie using nothing but Southern accents and get just as much diversity as with English accents. Throw in New England, Boston, New York, and the northern plains states and you would have quite an assortment of unique accents.
Now I want a fantasy movie with Cajun dwarves.
Cajun dwarves? That sounds awesome, I'm sold
I would love Bjorn by the bayou
American Southern accents would be better for fantasy because it's closer to old English.
America has many accents, NY, Boston, Southern, Appalachian, Midwest, Texas. Actors in America try to not have an accent. There's also Spanish accents of English. Lets not forget thug.
@@RPSchonherr "Thug" isn't an accent. It's also deeply offensive and borderline racist caricature.
The proper term is African American Vernacular English, sometimes also known as Ebonics. It has an actual grammatical structure.
White anglo-saxon speakers, or "proper English" speakers look down on AAVE because they've falsely associated it with criminal "thug" or "ghetto" behaviour.
@@RPSchonherr "Thug" isn't an accent. It's also deeply offensive and borderline racist caricature.
The proper term is African American Vernacular English, sometimes also known as Ebonics. It has an actual grammatical structure.
White anglo-saxon speakers, or "proper English" speakers look down on AAVE because they've falsely associated it with criminal "thug" behaviour.
"Thug" isn't an accent. It's also deeply offensive and borderline racist caricature.
The proper term is African American Vernacular English, sometimes also known as Ebonics. It has an actual grammatical structure.
White anglo-saxon speakers, or "proper English" speakers look down on AAVE because they've falsely associated it with criminal "thug" or "ghetto" behaviour.
@@RPSchonherr "Thug" isn't an accent. It's also deeply offensive and borderline racist caricature.
The proper term is African American Vernacular English, sometimes also known as Eb0nics. It has an actual grammatical structure.
White anglo-saxon speakers, or "proper English" speakers look down on AAVE because they've falsely associated it with criminal "thug" behaviour.
The Hobbit (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978), Conan the Barbarian (1982), The Last Unicorn (1982), The Flight of Dragons (1982), Wizards (1977), Dragonheart (1996), Dragonslayer (1981), The Neverending Story (1984)...
Would you like me to continue? All great fantasy movies, all with American accents. Except for Conan. He was Austrian. Accompanied by a ton of American ones.
I love this
Star Wars is another great fantasy story that is laden with American English accents.
WIZARD OF OZ, YOU FORGOT WIZARD OF OZ!!!
@@benseac I think Star Wars is more sci-fi than ancient/medieval fantasy, so it's different
@@girl-fromthemoonNo, it's definitely fantasy.
Has anyone ever heard that for Dragonball/Z/etc that Goku’s dub should be a southern American accent, because he is supposed to be a country bumpkin? It is apparently translated as such in the English mangas. I haven’t looked into it much but sounds like it would be hilarious
"Weeeeell shitfiyah, aw sho' do lyke me sumdat dere fitin'. Weeeheeyyyhh"
~ Goku
His Japanese actress made up an accent for him. Goku doesn't talk like a real Japanese person in the original dub.
@@hellacoorinna9995
"now hold on there mister freezee what da heck is a super sayain? some sort uh catchphrase?"
As someone raised in the state of Georgia, I am now imagining him as some farm boy with the same accent as my high school physics teacher from Stone Mountain.
@@JoybuzzahzMore or less- and he was written (manga) as uneducated, with childish grammar and vocabulary choices, more than a regional accent was given.
His wife, though- Chichi could absolutely work an Appalachian accent in a dub. She's written with a conspicuous Northern accent, as an absolute bumpkin- socially more or less the Japanese equivalent of a hillbilly.
I think Gohan was presented that way, too, but then also deliberately written with uncharacteristically adult and formal grammar and vocabulary choices, despite the accent. IIRC.
The longer the video goes on, while constantly playing clips with american accents, the less the claim that american accents don't fit fantasy feels like it has any weight tbh. You undo your own thesis with the sheer number of examples of good fantasy.
You should point out that in the MCU, all the major superhero characters mostly speak American accents except Thor. Why? Because Thor came from Asgard, which is portrayed in a "fantasy" setting.
Good point. All the Asgardians have British accents, actually.
Just because the United States is a much newer COUNTRY than England, Scotland, etc. doesn't mean that the language is any more "new" or "old", since ALL modern English accents both come from the same source and have changed over the centuries.
I think it's less "The American accent doesn't fit" and more "The accent must be specifically modern English. Perhaps Welsh. Maybe Scottish or Irish if you want to stretch it."
And it's funny, too, because what we call the modern "British accent" was specifically designed very recently with the intent on being specifically posh to essentially separate the aristocracy from the commoners, and later the main-landers from the colonials. When the US was colonized, English people would have spoken something similar to many American accents.
There's something similar with things like Latin. It's often portrayed as some grandiose British accent on top of Italian pronunciations. But like "Vini Vidi Vici" was pronounced more like "Win-E Wid-E Wick-E". Yet if you were to portray an old Roman story with that accent, you would be laughed off the stage.
Medieval stuff would have probably had an accent that sounds a bit Dutch or German. But again, portray that accurately, and people won't know what they are listening to, and why they changed it from the" real Medieval British accent"....of 20th century aristocrats.
It would be like saying "This is inaccurate. That Iroquois man in the 14th century would have DEFINITELY sounded like Audrey Hepburn."
This reminds me: The Irish comedy trio Foil Arms & Hog have a sketch about how accents are chosen for different roles, always the same accents for the same stereotypes for no reason.
I feel like it only doesn't fit when you're trying to do a fantasy set in the very specific medieval esque setting. Everything else it works fine, and fantasy frankly has expanded to be far more than simply vaguely medieval Europe.
The Cosmere especially is a great example of how an American accent (in the audiobooks) works perfectly fine for the settings, which are either more modern or very different from past time periods on Earth.
@@WasatchWind All of Urban Fantasy. (Somewhat ironic that Urban Fantasy is very often not even urban, merely "not medieval". Even when it is European.)
You know, the funny thing is that modern American English is closer to British English as it were in the 1800s then modern British English is.
If you get time, look up the 'rhotic R'. Basically a lot of things signature to the British accent nowadays is attributed to the wealthy class deliberately speaking differently to distinguish themselves from working class and poor people during the turn of the century.
A similar situation in modern times you can look at is American Black culture and how aspects of their way of speaking have permeated into American English at large.
Americans have the closest dialect to 16th Century English. If you plucked a dude off the Mayflower and dropped him into modern Pennsylvania we'd be able to perfectly understand him and vice versa. The 16th Century was the start of the Early Modern Period. Actual Mideval English is Incomprehensible nonsense because english as we know it is a French Creole created by the Normans during thier occupation of England.
No, the West Country does.
I want an epic historical set piece set in Rome. I want the setting, costume design, and over all feel to be like that of Gladiator (the first one obviously) or HBO's Rome. It might be about Julius Caesar rise and fall or about one of the crisis of the third century or any other epic moment in their history but the movie/tv series has to be sincere.
However instead talking in a posh English accent I want them to have the most stereotypical New York Italian accent possible. Get everyone and I do mean everyone who has played a role in any a Scorsese film or the Sopranos on that set. I want here a lot of Aaa's and ooH's in the senate building having serious discussion.
You might like the live action adaptations of Asterix.
Now I want to hear a Julius Caesar who is basically just Mr. Defazio from Laverne and Shirley
Most people don't realize that the "standard" American accent isn't temporally stable. Even if you look at interviews with regular folks from the 1980's you can detect a difference with how Americans speak today. And don't even talk about the 1930's and 40's. In another hundred years American "English" will be laced with Spanish and other immigrant vocabulary etc.
Oh god I hope not.
Hasta la vista baby
@@huguesdepayens807Why not? Spanish is one of the richest languages there is (especially the Latin American dialects), so an infusion of it and American English, as is already happening, is a nice spin to see. Plus people would no longer be able to make fun of Americans for only knowing the dialects of their counties.
Guys never heard Shakespeare in a southern accent clearly.
Sounds better than any British reading I’ve ever heard.
Personally I’m not interested in peddling pure stereotype at my dnd table for the sake of someone’s mental discomfort at an American accent.
Also the amount of people in these comments saying films should use accented versions of English instead of having characters from nations not supposed to be Britain speak with a British accent.
Either put it in the language they spoke or stick with whatever accent you want, because lemme tell you… they don’t speak English with a Russian accent in Russia. It’s not more realistic, you just really like stereotypes
That's actually one of the ways we can piece together which sounds are less changed from pre colonial English than others- if the poetry still rhymes. I remember thinking it was weird that a lot of parts of Shakespeare rhymed in American English when they wouldn't in a British accent. Then I learned later that the modern American accent has had fewer sound changes than modern British English.
"And why should the people listen to you?" "Because unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English Accent"
When people complain about Kevin Costner's accent in Robin Hood I like to remind them that if the movie were really linguistically accurate they'd be speaking Middle English and modern audiences wouldn't even be able to understand the dialog without subtitles.
Is that from Robin Hood Men in Tights? 😂Iconic.
The thing is, there are a lot of American accents, but foreigners usually don’t see them in shows because we go with the “Midwest” accent for the news and most shows/movies. I’m from the Midwest and aside for how I pronounce my “As,” I don’t have much of an accent. The only time you hear southern or creole accents, is when a movie takes place in the south or someone is from the south. You only hear New York or Chicago accents in their respective locations, or if a character is supposed to come from there.
But, ultimately, while there are nuances in American English, keep in mind schools have worked very hard to teach kids the “Midwest” accent for the last 30ish years to the point even Texans sound like they’re from up north and not the South. Much like the Cockney accent (supposedly) the other accents are gradually fading away
Isn't a Midwestern accent the same as a New York accent?
@@dazai_.992No. New Yorkers have their own distinct accents. It’s supposedly distinct in each borough, but as a non-New Yorker I can’t tell hear the difference 😅
@@dazai_.992No, those are very different accents.
It always stands out to me when there are American accents in fantasy, but I'm never opposed to it. Doesn't break my immersion
They do? That's like saying British accents don't belong in Star Wars. There's a point you have to do a little suspension of disbelief and accept that things are just what they are. British actions don't really make sense in fantasy, either, when you realize a lot of old fantasy base stories pre-date the British accent EXISTING, or at least existing as it does today. Old English sounds nothing like modern English with a British accent, for example, and Middle English doesn't really, either. Not to mention that, as linguists and folks that study these things have pointed out, (some) American accents are closer to early Modern English than British accents are due to cultural drift. By being more isolated initially, US/American English has changed less over the last several centuries.
So this is literally entirely a personal perception "feels" thing with people that is actually the opposite of reality, as the British accent is actually more alien to a fantasy setting than an English one.
But I tend to treat it like I treat Star Trek: Rule of Universal Translator. That I'm hearing it in my brain's interpretation of their language, not that these people are speaking Modern English at all. : )
One day a Newfie accent will make it to a fantasy movie.
One episode of Lexx does that. The contrast is hilarious.
I remember hearing a stand-up comedian do a bit about a Crips and Bloods docu-drama made 100 years from now. He said everyone in Compton would have a British accent because history is English for some reason. Couldn't un-see it. Almost everyone in CHERNOBYL is British.
I personally think that a good example of American accents being used in medieval setting is the Disney cartoon version of the Adventures of Robin Hood. In the film they almost seamlessly mix in southern American accents with English accents. It took me and my friends years to really notice.
Oh my goodness, you're right! I never thought about it till now. But it is interesting that all the main, "serious" characters have British accents. Except Little John.
In Star Wars, why are there so many people with British accents when they couldn’t of possibly ever even have been to Great Britain?
If the fantasy is based on American tall tales, it would work. Or even a "western" feeling fantasy, it doesn't have to have cowboy hats or pistols, but a frontier, a man riding alone, a town tormented by bandits, etc. Or discovery, or taming the land. Japan can make Scifi and fantasy movies and they still feel like Samurai movies. Maybe it's the same with America and Westerns.
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."
Can you imagine that in a British accent?
@@Steve_Stowers Gunslinger: "Oi, mate, get back 'ere ya bugger."
😂😂😂
That "western fantasy feeling" you described is exactly the vibe I get from Star Wars
@@girl-fromthemoon Oh, totally! There are splashes of eastern mysticism in the Force, but Han Solo is a certified American space cowboy. And Luke is a farmboy from a frontier homestead (that even gets raided by "indians").
You could say the small personal spaceship is an evolution of the cowboy's horse and the detective/gangster's muscle car (which is an urban version of westerns), and the main plot is basically a mashup of the American Revolution and WW2.
@@Steve_StowersAs some narrator, perhaps, but it would still feel somewhat like a documentary
Why would fantasy characters be speaking in languages we understand with accents we recognize, period? 🙄
A fair point, at least for fantasy that is not set in or inspired by some particular real-world setting. And of course the answer is that, otherwise, it would make things much harder on both the filmmakers and the audience.
So it can be digestible to audiences. If you wanna make something really hardcore fantasy. Entirely with a made up language that would be cool, but you would likely find only a very small audience who would dedicate themselves to learning the language. From there then there would be translations made so it could be more accessible, and for different dialects you'd have translators taking inspiration from English accents for more posh characters, and etc. You'd end up with it being exactly the same.
TLDR; Because that's f-ing stupid you smartass
Even most medieval period films miss out on the fact that the languages of time were very different. If I were suddenly transported to 12th century England I'd find Middle English to be mostly incomprehensible and I'd have to learn to speak it like it were a foreign language because it essentially would be.
The same reason why people in fiction are omniglots who can communicate with anyone, regardless of if they're from a different country or a different planet.
@@The_Worst_Guy_Ever I read enough fiction to know this isn't always the case. There are such things as translators and go-betweens or learning a new language in fiction. Sometimes it's even a major focus of the story like in Enemy Mine.
I think fantasy should have the harshest possible German accents.
I'd say, it's mostly conditioning: the vast majority of the English language media makes it so, forcing that as a convention, so a deviation from that sounds off.
The fact that the term "fantasy" in English speaking circles often evokes specifically European inspired settings and concepts also makes the European form of the language sound "more natural" as a pairing.
But that is also part of that conditioning, as the majority of the most popular fantasy worlds in the English speaking world draw far more from European ideas and settings than from other cultures.
Given the obsession modern fantasy like ROP has with diversifying medieval villages, I demand that we go all the way and include southerner elves.
Honestly I kid but that would be kind of hilarious to hear "Ya'll dun goofed, I reckon" in a fantasy show.
Now I’m imagining an entire village of hobbits who talk like American hillbillies and I’m torn between laughing my ass off & thinking “hey this could actually work for real!”
For Tolkien specifically, since Sindarin shares a lot of sounds with Finnish, I want Finnish accented elves, with hints of Welsh for those who grew up speaking Quenya (which for some mind-melting reason is protrayed as all elves in RoP. That show gives me hives. 😡😑)
Accents should be "accurate" to the location and era settings.
Please don't fake bad accents. Always check with a native of the area first.
As a German speaker, THIS. Literally 90% of movies don't even bother and go for some bellowed snappy sounding nonsense interlaced with a few Jawohl! and Los!. Christoph Waltz was such a treat as probably the first German characters actually speaking proper German.
It's a bit difficult to do that if you're making a historical movie set a few thousand years ago. First off, nobody really knows for sure what they sounded like, and secondly, there aren't any natives of that area still alive to tell us.
For instance, to be accurate to the location and era, the characters in Xena: Warrior Princess would have had to speak with the accents of ancient Macedonia, Greece, Egypt, Troy, numerous places in the Middle East, Latin (for the Rome storyline), American English (for the Indiana Jones spoof), Mongolian languages, various Slavic languages, and so on.
Xena and Hercules were primarily made for the American and Canadian markets, so the showrunners made no effort to hide those accents. Lucy Lawless normally speaks with an Australian accent, but used an American accent. And the character in one of the clips in this video, Callisto, is Canadian.
It's also difficult to do accurate location/era accents if your movie is set in some futuristic time. The David Lynch Dune movie in 1984 just let the actors use their normal accents, and this has led some fans to gripe about Duke Leto having a German accent, Lady Jessica having a British Accent, and Paul having an American accent. I just headcanon it as Jessica's accent being that of the planet she grew up on - Wallach IX. Duke Leto's accent is the one the nobility of the planet Caladan use, but Paul's accent isn't the same because he spends much of his time with tutors and servants. He would have picked up the accent of the people of lesser rank.
I'm Australian and I can do a convincing Southern/Midwestern accent (not so much a good general American accent for some reason, I could do it but I struggle to get into it because of how subtle some differences are easily missed but obvious when missed) which I honed from years of mimicking what I see from games and television. I think that any Australian with the lighter and nasal variant (as opposed to the deep Ocker variant) of our accent can learn to speak like an American with just a few days of coaching because plenty of us almost sound American until you hear us pronounce certain words like Cant (with is pronounced like "aren't") or anything with an R at the end (e. After pronounced as Afta).
Doing a modern British accent in 1600 England would be inaccurate. Shakespeare likely had what now would be called an American accent.
@@Joybuzzahz Which American accent? They're not all the same.
But on the other hand, STALKER 2 with a British accent also looks out of place. 😅😅
The Witcher series is the best example I can give for Americans being in fantasy
Honestly, that's a pretty strange example now that I think about it. Neither the original author who wrote the books and the studio who adapted the Witcher into a game series are from the USA, are they?
The Witcher eng vo is dire
Isn't Witcher Polish?
Dune has the tone of a fantasy epic, and it has no problem with American accents. The key is good acting.
14:35 do you realize how SMALL of a box you just put the entire American film industry into…
It depends on where the fantasy takes place and what kind of fantasy it is.
Bro should have specified "Medieval European Fantasy"
@@Orange_Swirl Indeed. I spent the video thinking "Are we just assuming that 'fantasy' = medieval-European-inspired fantasy?" American accents are absolutely appropriate for something like The Wizard of Oz. (We haven't gotten a faithful adaptation of Baum's book, but if we did, I would fully expect it to have American accents.)
@@Steve_Stowers western fantasy
“Because unlike some Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent “
😂👍
Fantastic movie.
Robin Hood wouldn't have a modern English accent, because the modern English accent was exclusively for the upper class until the industrial revolution which took place after a few decades after the USA's founding, and his thing was kind of, stealing from the upper class as a protector of the proletariat.
Game of Thrones probably leaned so much into British English because Martin based it loosely on the War of the Roses, if I recall correctly.
British English, and the varied accents, are also closely tied to class-based systems, whereas America was founded on egalitarianism and lacks that class distinction in its dialects. That means it is very effective at portraying both elegance and crudeness, depending on the accent used. American English can come off as casual, and maybe even sloppy, and isn't readily associated with structures such as monarchies, which are prevalent in much of fantasy.
I do think a variety of English accents and dialects, including American, should be used to some extent in most fantasy that has varied cultures. I think such a thing adds to the atmosphere.
That's something I like about The Elder Scrolls. They utilize various accents, including American ones, but it feels completely natural.
Now we need an american fantasy where the elves all sound like they're from Tennessee, the Dwarves are midwesterners, the Wizard's from Jersey.and the Dragon's from Texas.
Get Patrick Page to voice the Souther dragon. He’s done it once before.
The one sided beef Europeans have toward Americans is so funny
C.S Lewis is not British. He is Irish. Belfast is not in Britain, it is in Ireland. Also he wasn't even in the UK at the time, as Belfast was not part of the UK back then.
I know it's sci fi, but Star Wars handled American and British accents well, with American accents signifying the outer rim of the galaxy and British accents at the core. I think American accents could work fine, but they should represent something specific.
Still the army of darkness is a Masterpiece and very adventurous.
Bruce Campbell best choice for that movie.
He is a bad example to start with because he works so well, because it's a fish out of water story. And it doesn't fit the point he is trying to make.
to clearify, they dont fit in PREMODEN fantasy because its a modern accent. but it works just fine in steampunk or StarWars
Modern British English accents aren't any older. It's had a ton of sound changes too- in fact it's had more sound changes from pre colonial English than American English has. But both are still equally modern.
I find English accents for ancient Romans tiresome and pretentious. A holdover from Shakespeare and BBC productions I suppose. English accents really worked in The Death of Stalin though!
Most fantasy movies aren’t actually British accents - they’re Mid-Atlantic accent or Atlantian. Which is a mix of American and British accents popular in the US in the 30’s.
In the Spanish language actors tried to use old verb conjugation in Fantasy.
Kinda like saying "thou art" and "thy hast" instead of "you are" and "you have," or like saying "he/she/it hath" instead of "he/she/it has."
That's definitely cool though
@justinjozokos1699 Kinda the first one. Saying "vos sabéis " instead of "tú sabes".
@@hanleylopezescano5977 I don't Know much Spanish at all, but I was recently comparing the conjugations of the various Romance languages against those of Latin, and in some tenses Spanish and Italian can get crazy close to the original Latin. I think the closest I saw so far was that the Latin imperfect tense of esse was only a few letters off from the Spanish imperfect of ser. Also the Latin perfect tense of esse is only a few letters off from the preterite tense of ser. Makes sense though.
Some other media does this as well. In Final Fantasy 6, there's a character who uses proper Middle-English pronouns (Thou/Thee and You/Ye). In Final Fantasy XIV, there was a character that spoke with an archaic Japanese accent in the original, so when they translated it to American, they weren't sure the best way, so they use a hybrid of very formal Modern English with a bit of Middle English. It's funny to people to the point it has been dubbed "Urianger speak" after the character Urianger who speaks it. The voice actor apparently has a lot of fun with it irl, too.
13:00 fun fact: Warwick Davis had to adopt an American accent in that movie, even thouth he's a Brit.
My personal counterpoint… Elder Scrolls, especially Cyrodiil, Western Skyrim, and the Forbear Cities of Hammerfell, could be a good place for an American accent. Those areas specifically have the same kind of paradoxical ruggedness and universality where an American accent would be a nice artistic touch. 🇺🇸
I can't remember how far I was into the second game in the recent God of War series when I realized that the Greek titular character, his son, and the entire pantheon of Norse gods all had American accents. Odin was performed by Richard Schiff in his distinctly New York accent. But all the performances managed to strike exactly the right tone, comfortably honest, or grandiose stage-like as needed. Set in a world of gods, the game is as fantastical as it gets, and yet the accents never feel out of place. The only exception is the character Mimir, who has a Scottish accent any dwarf would be proud of. He's supposedly a former adviser of Odin, but as the story unfolds, it's hinted at that he was once Robin Goodfellow from the fairy court of Oberon and Titania, as depicted in the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night's Dream. So make of that what you will.
Also, I think everyone can agree Doug Cockle's performance for the english translation of the Witcher games works just fine, despite him using his distinctly American accent. I think there's a way to do it, threading the needle between not too modern and not too performative. I think Cavill made the right choice in using an english accent, though he was a fan of the Witcher 3, and borrowed heavily from Cockle. But in future english adaptations, I'd love it if Geralt's famously foreign-sounding Rivian accent was interpreted as Polish. It's such a great, underappreciated accent. I think it's insane that fantasy films limit themselves to either British and American accents. There are loads more options to choose form.
Kratos is literally voiced by Black Americans and no one even thinks about it 🤷🏾♂️
@@karatekoala4270 I definitely think about it. Who the hell else can say "BOY!" better than Christopher Judge? No one. The man is one of a kind.
@@rottensquid I appreciate you. And your insight. Also I worked for a Polish woman for years and if Cavill could've pulled it off I would've loved that shit
@@karatekoala4270 Not Cavill, but thanks to DC Projekt and the Netflix show, the character is now in the cultural zeitgeist. So I expect we haven't seen the last of the Witcher in the film medium.
Geralt, Triss, Lambert, Vesemir and Eskel all have American accents and they all fit in the fantasy world fine. It really is how the accent is performed and the strength of the dialogue and writing in general.
6:22 Game of Thrones is literally based on the War of the Roses which was a European historical event.
I want a transatlantic accent fantasy
Edit: also you forgot to mention "Dragonheart" with Dennis Quaid!
i want like a north midwest acent fantasy, absolutely adorable acent i could listen to for hours LOL
Accents don’t bother me. It’s dialogue. I loved Hercules:The Legendary Journeys, but the dialogue was often waaayy too modern. And that was back in the late ‘90s/early 2000s. Goodness knows how it would be written now!
I have no idea what some people are talking about these days, because they don't use complete sentences, and what they do use often only has half the words (as in the front part of the word, with an "o" tacked on).
I actually dont mind American accents in a fantasy setting if they're featured in a specific region or culture, while the others have British English and other accents
If there is a character in a fantasy story with an American accent, the writer probably did it on purpose to make the character stand out.
Or the character is the protagonist and his familiar speech is there to help give him a bit of an everyman image- never mind; basically what you said.
@DiamondKingStudios That's part of my point.
@@Arthur_Deadeye_Morgan If the character is intentionally made familiar, that sets him apart from the rest of the world, which, being fantasy, is supposed to be strange and foreign.
@@DiamondKingStudios That's why my main character in my story has an American accent.
As an American, British accents have NEVER sounded anything but "advanced" English to me.
There are fantasy genres where the American accent works better, I think most Sci-fi fantasy feels more natural with an American accent. But it is weird with a more Europe centered setting to have a "non-European" accent. As well as anything Lovecraftian (since so much of that universe takes place in New England.)
I mean... it doesn't sound 'natural' if you're not American. As you say, setting-specific stories might naturally call for different accents - various British accents for Harry Potter, New England accents for Lovecraft, etc - but for anything set in an invented setting, whatever the sub-genre, no accent you choose is more or less natural (or correct) than any other.
I do have a bias against American accents in epic fantasy, but I acknowledge that it isn't really rational, and I don't see non-American accents as the natural option to go with. I just have a subjective preference.
One glaring exception is Doctor Who. Whoever cast Eric Roberts as the Master in the 1996 movie was a world-class idiot of the first order. That character should NEVER have an American accent, any more than the Doctor should.
I find animated fantasy shows and movies are much more likely to have a diverse range of accents, like the dragon prince using different accents for different races of elves, how to train you dragon having American and Scottish accents and Arcane having mostly American accents but also some British ones
American fantasy all sounds like they are in a western, but in the wrong clothes.
Unless its the dark tower so that invalidates your entire argument and they say the apalachian accent is actually closer to how elizabethen english actually sounded
Ironically that's how lots of English people used to sound a long time ago. The American Accent is derived from an accent similar to the contemporary West Country accent (which to this day in England has a bit of a "cowboy/pirate" vibe to it) that was prevalent before Cockney influence spread outside of the London area (and before received pronunciation was adopted by more of the upper class and elements trickled down).
@@johnnyjohn-johnson7738 Very much this. People don't realize American English (at least some accents/dialects of it) is/are closer to early Modern English than the British accent. Due to being initially more isolated, the American versions didn't change as rapidly through the centuries and are closer, not farther, from medieval English. Not only that, but many times, characters aren't even speaking "English" in the first place. It's more like we have a Universal Translator that is translating their language to something we can understand anyway.
It's like how all the Galactic Empire people in Star Wars speak British English despite the setting not only being very likely before British ever came into being, but in another galaxy completely culturally isolated from it anyway.
@@SubduedRadical I don't think that Star Wars is set in the distant past of anything resembling our reality, I think that it's a completely separate alternate universe and that the British accent comes from Coruscant humans having their own version of Great Britain in their own distant past. I see "A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far Far Away" as coming from the perspective of a Jedi scribe rather than from our perspective.
@@johnnyjohn-johnson7738 "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" implies it IS set in our universe.
There's also a non-canon/old canon story that Earth actually came from there, it was transported here in the distant past (apparently, Indiana Jones finds Han's skeleton on it), though that's pretty non-canon at this point.
But "a galaxy far away" would be in this same universe, most likely, as you'd describe a parallel universe in a different way than "far away", even if "far away" might be loosely accurate.
Why would a Jedi scribe describe HIS OWN galaxy as far away?
.
I did like how one of the UA-cam creators that does some mocking videos (the ones about Anakin's thesis being on the tragedy of Darth Plageus the Wise studies) about this. He has Anakin say something about a story with "gen-is say quois" (sorry, I don't know French, but you can sound that out to get the phrase) and the Palpatine character says to him "Wait...what language was that just now?!" mocking that French shouldn't be a language in Star Wars (nor should English) and we're just interpreting it in our own language as viewers of the movie.
When I was a kid, I loved watching the old 1950s Hollywood historical epics, especially the Roman Empire ones. Even then, as a Canadian who spoke both a peculiar old-fashioned variety of Canadian French, and an equally peculiar far northern variety of Canadian English, I was very aware of the different accents used in films. One thing I noticed was that in all the Roman Empire films, the Senators and Emperors and other bigwigs in togas all had RP British accents, or the Shakespearian Actor accent, the legionaries and other macho characters had Midwestern American accents, and the slaves and peasants had lower class UK accents. Today's fantasy films seem to have a more complicated version of this convention.
Possibly the most successful fantasy films of all time were filmed in New Zealand, and many of the bit parts were played by Kiwis. But can you imagine a big fantasy film in which all the main characters had Kiwi accents?! I would go see it for sure, and love it just for that, but the whole world would probably be in shock.
Very well put video! Keep up the work :D
I liked warcraft growing up because of the American accents. British accents sounded too cliche or corny and earthly. The American accents made the fantasy aspect feel different
General American accents in The Elder Scrolls are fine. I mean Neutral or Mid Atlantic. A Southern accent would be too out of place though.
I feel like the fantasy genre’s association with the medieval period almost makes the American accent anachronistic as well
That's the irony. We've been conditioned to think of the British English accents to be how people in the 1500s spoke, but American English is actually closer to pre colonial English than modern British English is, although it's also had a fair share of sound changes, just less drastic ones.
It's only because we associate Britain with monarchy and America with post-feudal that we think the accents are correlated to time, which is reinforced by the media over and over again, even though they aren't. Language doesn't care when governments divide into sovereign nations
With Lord of the rings many of the actors were from Australia or New Zealand which also doesn't seem to fit into fantasy
Those actors are talking with British style accents though.
This video is like when you've got a paragraph worth of content, but a two page assignment.
It's not that complex. Fantasy that's set a thousand years ago isn't going to use a dialect developed 200 years ago. Modern European English may not be accurate either, but it's right enough for collective society.
The Harry Potter reference is moot. That's literally set in modern Europe.
Hard disagree all fantasy characters should have southern accents
Elves have snobby, upper-class, "my old Southern family has generational wealth" (don't ask how we got it...) accents. Dwarves are Appalachian: work-hard play-hard mountain folk. Orcs are Texan: big and seem like they have guns. A human fishing town sounds Cajun, probably.
One blueish dwarf that swears alot had something to say
Broc: "The fuck you mean"
Geralt of Rivia would like a word.
It's not like you're accustomed to the Polish dubbing of every The Witcher game so far.
"Why should the people listen to you?"
"Because unlike other Robinhoods, I can speak in an English accent."
Men in TIghts.
Medieval fantasy in English accent and English songs in American accent. This is the norm that we have grown used to. Why? Because they just fit!
I have to agree there are only 2 American accents.
Of course I also think all Brits sounds like Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins. 😂
Is it the same with Spanish language? Like an American fantasy movie and the English is in British accent, is the dub in Spanish like Spanish accent (from Spain) and not Mexican or Hispanic-American?
Even in video games too, I’ve read something that the dub in Final Fantasy XVI is in “Latin American Spanish”, and some Spanish gamers kind of didn’t like it as the Latino accent didn’t fit the high fantasy setting.
Historically most things dubbed in Spanish were dubbed in "Spain Spanish" (ie Madrid/Northern Castille), though some other things like Disney movies were mainly dubbed in Mexican Spanish, then as time went on, the Mexican and Spain Spanish dubs have been the most common,the main reasons is that for Spain Spanish as Spain is the richer country, companies feel that it is a more reliable market, and for Mexican Spanish, well, Mexico is just next to the US. For the Final Fantasy thing, that series is very big in Spain among 80s and 90s people (some guys are actual fanatics), so of course there is a feeling of betrayment, though I haven't investigated if FFXVI actually has "Spain Spanish" dub. The thing is that fantasy here is mostly foreing products that we consume, so there isn't an agreed upon accent that fits fantasy settings, I personally would say that Galician accent (not the same thing as Galician language btw) would be the most accurate for castle-esque fantasy, while Seville/Western Andalucia accent would be very fitting in Renaissance/Exploration age fantasy that is becoming more popular today.
@@DonPedroman Wow, that's really interesting, the different accents in Spain (Galician and Andalucian accents) for high fantasy/middle age films/series. I've got to ask, if what was the accents used in the Spanish dub of Game of Thrones? Did Game of Thrones spanish dub also used like the one you said, Galician and Andalucian accents?
I would also like to add (more in video games), the original Resident Evil 4 (2005) received major criticisms because the "Spanish" voice actors that voiced Spanish Characters (the game takes place in Spain) sounded like from Mexico or Latin American. In Resident Evil 4 Remake (2023), it was praised because they finally used Spanish accent for the voice actors. Although I'm not familiar what regional accent, as I don't know where the Resident Evil 4 takes place in Spain, if it's in the northern region (Galicia), or somewhere else like Asturias or Catalonia region.
No not really, normally series and movies have two Spanish translations, one for Spain and the other for Latin America. The Latin American one uses a sort of neutral accent that doesn't give away any specific regionality, the Spanish one on the other hand uses Spanish slang and accent, in both cases whenever have a character speaking in an old fashioned way they use phrases and terms that are considered old fashioned, instead of changing their accent. Most people prefer Latin American dubs to Spanish ones, even a lot of people within Spain.
I would love to see a fantasy film in which a character enters and says ,”what up ya’ll?”
There is also the fact that American regions have their own mythology behind them. You cant really world build when we already did.
There is Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling, if they ever made that into a movie, you would need American accents.
I mean, Britain also did a lot of world building and has its own mythology behind it, yet it feels natural in fantasy.
British accents in fantasy are fine. But British accents when the characters are Greek or Eastern European is so ridiculous
American fantasy needs to take advantage of the early colonial period, when swords and armor were still around in some form and make something out of that.
I've actually heard that most high fantasy is more based on the 18th and 19th century than the medieval period, minus the guns
Yeah. Stone castles and arming swords are medieval, but baroque style palaces grand balls, and sword duels all existed in early America around the same time as Europe.
@@haleywilson520Clothing and architecture wise, definitely.
What about the Hunger Games, Maze Runner, and Divergent? I guess maybe they wouldn't be considered fantasy to some. But if you but Bright on the fantasy list I'd put those.
Anyway, those where all killer movies with American accents, for the most part
American accents don't fit fantasy because fantasy is essentially "Old World-Fiction": Dragons, knights, kings and what not are deeply rooted in the Old World, that's why an American accent is immersion breaking. Just as a German or RP accent would be immersion breaking in something about the Chupacabra or the many horrors of Appalachia.
But that is conflating real world history with fantasy. Most fantasy didn't take place in Europe or Asia or America. But those influences can still exist in the setting. Also, literally every culture in the world has some form of dragon in it's history. They not a strictly European thing.
@@karatekoala4270 "Old World" includes everything from Ireland to Japan and from Iceland to the tip of Africa. American accents feel off in Fantasy because Anglo-America, for lack of a better word, does not have a past.
But if a production of Shakespeare was put on, the accents in the play would be British despite hamlet being set in Denmark or Julius Caesar set in Rome. I think the point is it’s down to association, Jake gylllenhaal didn’t get cast in LOTR because of his accent.
@@pallasathena1555 Brad Dourif was cast with a perfect villainous British accent though. Maybe Jake couldn't do a decent British accent?
@@mikespearwood3914 should he need to employ one though?