8 Words to Spice Up Your Talk Like a Pirate Day

International Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming up on September 19, so today we’ll talk about pronunciations and phrases associated with pirates! 

‘Arr’

For example, you may be wondering why pirates are usually portrayed as speaking a rhotic variety of English—in other words, why do pirates say, “Arr”? 

One theory is that many famous pirates, including Blackbeard (real) and Long John Silver (fictional), were said to come from a British region known to have a strong rhotic West Country accent. 

The 'Arr!' of a pirate comes from the West Country English accent.

Pirates also came from other regions, and “Arr” was used in some depictions of pirates before the 1950s, but the actor Robert Newton is largely responsible for popularizing the “Arr” sound for depicting pirates. Newton played Long John Silver in the movie “Treasure Island” in 1950 and Blackbeard in the movie “Blackbeard, the Pirate” in 1952. 

Newton grew up near that same West Country region in southwestern England as these pirates—Dorset, to be specific—and he used the local accent to portray the pirates on film, and the hard-R accent has been associated with pirates ever since. But pirates weren’t a homogenous group. There were Scottish pirates, French pirates, Spanish pirates, and so on, so you can’t say there was one specific way that pirates talked. Some may have said “Arr,” but a lot probably didn’t. We don’t have recordings or even many writings to help figure it out.

‘Pirates’

The word “pirate” itself is old. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is “Of multiple origins. Partly a borrowing from French [and] partly a borrowing from Latin.” Many languages have a similar sounding term for these sea raiders including Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, and Italian. Etymology Online traces it all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European word “per-ya-.”

Other long-used names for pirates include “buccaneers” and “freebooters.”

‘Buccaneers’

“Buccaneer” first described pirates along the Spanish coast, and believe it or not, the word is related to “barbecue.” A boucan was a type of barbecue, and a boucaner was someone who dried meat on the barbecue. French settlers on St. Domingo were called “boucanier,” which meant “someone who hunts wild oxen” and dries it on the boucan or barbecue. Those French hunters turned to pirating...

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