Talk Like A Pirate! The Linguistics of "Treasure Island"

Linguistics of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Classic

Part of Hardiman’s acting book, Dynamic Acting Theory stipulates that the characters of a play speak in such a way that give actors clues about intent, how they move, respond to changes and interact. This Hardiman calls Action Range. These things, in turn, work together to help create a realistic character, complete with cultural history and dialect. With most plays, the playwright has already taken care of these textual clues. Some authors choose to write the sounds of their characters words using punctuation and alternate spellings like Arthur Miller (The Crucible) and even authors such as J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter) and J. R. R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings). Hardiman had noticed how there were distinct voices in Treasure Island, indicated by vowels, consonants, word choice, word combination, punctuation and length of line as well as phonetic spelling.

Four particular dialects and action ranges became clear through the adaptation process, two more vague sounds, and two very specific sounds. The first was the Townspeople Sound: a coastal English sound the wound and curved and looped, found early on at the Inn, a sound Jim and his family would have. Then there was the Pirate Sound: a gravelly, dry-throat, sun-burnt sound that would vary from pirate to pirate, but stay largely within the action ranges of coiling, winding and heaving. The next two sounds are easily placed within social system and geography: Received Pronunciation (RP (The upperclass British sound made famous in Dr. Dolittle) and Scottish. Both the Squire and Doctor are RP, while the captain is decidedly Scottish in action range and vowels.

August Roy, former LLCC Theatre student and now UIS Liberal Studies major, has been working on developing an easier system for actors to learn dialects, so Hardiman brought her onto the project to help share the research the sounds. Together Hardiman and Roy worked for several months, before and after auditions, to identify a dialect for each of the sounds. Between them, they finally settled on two recordings that would be most beneficial for the actors learning the Townspeople Sound, through Paul Meier’s IDEA website: (http://www.dialectsarchive.com/england-32 is an example)  RP was a bit easier, and is easier to get to for most actors from the Midwest. They share many similarities. Scottish is one of the harder dialects to get to for the actor, as they soon found out. The more work, punching sound supported lower and belted more forcefully, fight the natural Midwestern and general American action ranges.

In all the dialects were designed to both fit the characters who speak them, as suggested by the language structure and the phonetic spellings that were used by Stevens and to create a sound pallet that enabled us to paint a picture of a very different world and time.