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How to Speak with a Wakandan Accent
According to Charles Pulliam Moore at io9, there’s a good reason there are a variety of “Wakandan” accents in the new Black Panther movie. Pragmatically, it’s because the cast comes from a variety of backgrounds and couldn’t help but bring their native idiolect into their respective roles. Beth McGuire, the dialect coach on the film, does a great job of explaining that at the linked article.
But there’s also an in-story explanation that actually makes some sense:
In both Marvel’s comics and movies, a significant part of the lore about Wakanda focuses on the fact that the country was never colonized—something that might make one assume there would be a singular Wakandan accent. But because the MCU’s depiction of Wakanda is so deeply rooted in much of the iconography and traditions of real-world African cultures, it makes sense that there would be a multiplicity of accents.
What’s more, Black Panther actually goes out of its way to emphasize the fact that modern-day Wakanda began as a coalition of multiple tribes who seized the opportunity to unite and grow together around the impact site of the vibranium mound. Respect for tradition and history is a central element to the MCU’s Wakandan society, and it stands to reason that the different accents unique to each tribe would still very much be a part of modern Wakanda.
So, linguistics and superheroes! Yay!
Why Do Dwarves Have Scottish Accents?
Eric Grundhauser of Atlas Obscura ponders why we associate certain (English) accents with fantasy creatures such as dwarves, elves, and trolls:
As radio and film adaptations of Tolkien’s works were released in later decades, you can see the slow evolution of the dwarven accent from the low British of 1977’s cartoon version of The Hobbit, to the more stylized accents of the pair of dwarves in 1985’s Legend, to the Welsh-by-way-of-Scotland grumblings of John Rhys Davies’ Gimli from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, right into the aggressive rolled R’s of Hearthstone’s dwarven Innkeeper.
“What you get is a sense of Celticness,” says Dominic Watt, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Speech Science at the University of York. Watt explains that many of the virtues associated with the stereotypical fantasy dwarf are also associated with the Scottish accent. “Scottish accents tend to be evaluated pretty positively,” he says. “Shrewdness, honesty, straight-forward speaking. Those are the sorts of ideas that the accent tends to evoke.” Watt also says that there are similar cultural stereotypes surrounding the drinking habits of dwarves and Scots.
He goes on to discuss the “culturally sophisticated” high-born accent of Tolkienesque elves, West Country hobbits, and Cockney orcs and trolls—which came about almost by accident:
Maybe the fantasy accent that can be most directly tied to Tolkien’s text is the working-class Cockney accent so often given to orcs and other sentient brutes in modern fantasy. Here we can look directly at the depiction of the trio of trolls in The Hobbit, which are written in a strangely modern dialect—a technique Tolkien rarely used, and later regretted. “In particular, he regretted making their language so recognizably modern. They wouldn’t say words like ‘blimey,’ for instance,” says Olsen.
In the later Lord of the Rings books, Tolkien’s orcs would speak in harsh, but basically correct common parlance, but in the larger view of the fantasy genre, the damage was done.
When you read a novel featuring elves, dwarves, or other fantastic races, what sort of accent do you hear in your head?
Darrell J. Pursiful 