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Did Pirates Really Say "Arrrr"?

No. And nobody ever walked the plank, either.

By Christopher Bonanos
Posted Tuesday, June 5, 2007, at 1:02 PM ET

Johnny Depp took home the best performance award at Sunday's MTV Movie Awards, for his role as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. (The third installment of the series topped the weekend box-office tallies again this past weekend, pulling in $43.2 million.) Depp's character famously speaks in a dissolute London mumble inspired by Keith Richards. But virtually all his crewmen hew to the classic movie-pirate patois, full of growled consonants and shiver-me-timbers slang. Wait, did pirates really say "arrrrr"?

Probably not. Both that phrase and the accent that goes with it are strictly Hollywood. They originated with Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in the movies and on TV through much of the 1950s. Newton was from Dorset, in the Cotswolds district of southwest England, and the regional accent he brought to the movies included a rolled "r." Though Dorset may well have produced its share of sailors, they were hardly the only pirates out there; most seamen—and especially the outlaws on pirate vessels—were people who struck out from oppressed nations, like Scotland and Ireland, to start over on the high seas.

So, was there a typical pirate accent at all? Among British outlaws, yes: The onboard speech was most likely underclass British sailor with extra curse words, augmented with a polyglot slang of French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch picked up around the trade routes. "Arrrrr" is strictly fiction, as are a number of the other affiliated signifiers: Nobody ever walked the plank, and nobody has ever discovered an actual pirate treasure map. On the myth-confirming side, pirates were known to dress in loose clothing, guzzle rum and smash the empty bottles, and chase busty wenches through Caribbean ports.