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What are the accents of the characters in GoT?


Prince_Snow

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Valar Morgulis,

 

I was curious about the accents used in GoT, what are the accents of the different Houses? different characters? Jon Snow doesn't have the same accent as Davos or Varys...etc if anyone is good at accents and can tell me like which one they have that would be cool to know a bit more!

Cheers

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Jon Snow is meant to sound like Sean Bean, so the actor is attempting a Yorkshire accent.  It's nowhere near as strong as Sean's though and he sometimes pronounces words like he's from the south, but it's ok.

Davos has a Geordie accent, which is an accent from Newcastle in the north of England.

Varys just sounds posh to me, so RP - received pronunciation. 

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The problem is that there is a major inconsistency with the accents in the show.

The show could have gone down the route of having different accents for different areas of the Seven Kingdoms, but it chose not to. Kit Harrington (Jon) and Richard Madden (Robb) decided to replicate Sean Bean's (Ned) Yorkshire accent, but the rest of his children, Sansa, Arya, Bran (can't recall Rickon's voice) all had southern English accents. I found this strange and frustrating considering they were born and raised in Winterfell with other Northerners.

Roose and Ramsey are from the Dreadfort in the North, yet Roose speaks with an Irish/English hybrid accent and Ramsey speaks with a southern English accent.

Sam is from Hornhill in the reach, yet he speaks with a Mancunian accent (Manchester, northern England) despite his father Randyll and brother Dickon speaking with southern English accents.

You mention Davos, he speaks with a Geordie (North East England accent) and says to Missandei that this is his Flea Bottom accent, but Gendry is also from flee bottom and he has a more generic southern English accent, nothing like Davos' accent.

In Ep3, Davos points out that Missandei has an unusual accent; she tells him it is from Naath accent. Yet her accent is exactly the same as Daenerys, Sansa, Arya, Margeary, and they are all from different parts of Westeros.

I really don't think they have paid much mind to accents, which, I think, is a shame.

 

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts guys. I'm quite interested in accents, but as a foreigner I can't tell if the consistency is respected, nor if the accents are the same whitin the same family.

I was aware that for instance Sansa and Jon don't have the same accent, but it's interesting as you guys have an ear for it you might indeed feel a bit frustrated.

Accents are rarely well done in tv/movies/theatre, it takes a lot of hard work and a dialect/accent coach on set for every single line to be sure it's respected. I always wondered if the Valyrian language was always consistent for all of the characters that speak it, I know they have a dialect coach on set and that apparently Grey worm has the best Valyrian from what I recall from an interview. Same for the Dothraki, but for this one it seems quite consistent to my ear.

What about the Lannisters? Jaimie is played by a Danish actor but he seems quite good, it sounds like Cercei, Tywin or Jaime are using RP to me, Not sure about Tyrion though, is it a mix of American/southern british?

I also love Bronn's accent, note sure where to place it, but definitely a Northern accent.

 

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7 minutes ago, Prince_Snow said:

What about the Lannisters? Jaimie is played by a Danish actor but he seems quite good, it sounds like Cercei, Tywin or Jaime are using RP to me, Not sure about Tyrion though, is it a mix of American/southern british?

I also love Bronn's accent, note sure where to place it, but definitely a Northern accent.

 

The Lannister family is one of the families that have actually got a correlation between the accents. Tywin, Cersei, Jaime, Tyrion and Kevan all speak with RP, which suits nature of Lannisters, given they are an extremely wealthy, highborn family. This is more impressive considering the actors that play Jaime and Tyrion are Danish and American respectively. This makes it more baffling that British actors and actresses couldn't bend their accents slightly to fit with where they are from. Sam, Sansa, Arya and Bran being examples of cast members ignoring accent.

Bronn's accent is, indeed, Northern English, Jerome Flynn that plays him is actually from Kent, southern England.

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Wow, that's lovely to read. It's impressive knowing that apparently British accents are more difficult to do that an standard American one, so for a Danish or an American both Jaime and Tyrion are doing a great job. I hoped at some point that we'll hear accents from other countries like French, Carribbean, or Chinese, but my knowledge on the Game of Thrones World is quite small and I don't think it was meant to replicate our own real world. Even though in my head,  Westeros is like the equivalent of the UK, Dorne is Spain/South America and East we have the 9 free cities/Dothraki Sea/The Red Waste that would be kind of the Middle East/Asia.

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As a British person, you also associate different stereotypes with different accents, so as has already been said, you are going to instantly think someone with an RP (Lannister) accent is more posh and higher up the social scale than the "Northern" accents you get from the Starks. Amongst the Lannister's, Cersei and Tywin's are the only true southern/RP accents (Tywin's is the more actorly traditional RP, whereas Cersei's is a southern accent you would hear on the street), Jaime's is very good with just the very rare stray word, while to my ears Tyrion sounds like he is pronouncing every single word too precisely to be truly authentic. I mean, I love Peter Dinklage but you can tell (in a way you can't with Jaime) that he's putting the accent on.

As someone else has said, the Stark children's accents make no sense. While Robb and Jon do their best to copy Sean Bean's Sheffield accent, Sansa and Bran sound like they are from the Home Counties, while Arya has an ever so slight West Country accent. In my head, I put this down to the younger children being closer to their "southern" mother, who does a very good Southern English accent even though Michelle Fairley is from Northern Island.

Another set of interesting characters are Robert, Stannis and Renly, who for brothers have wildly different accents. Robert also has a Yorkshire accent, though a different one from Sean Bean. Sean Bean's is a Sheffield accent, and I believe Mark Addy (who plays Robert) is from York, but even though the cities are only fifty miles away from each other, you can tell they are from different places. So, even though I though "they were both raised by Jon Arryn", their accents are different enough to really make no sense. Stannis and Renly have quite non-descript southern accents, which I never thought made sense with Robert's York accent. Again, I think this was done to contrast the rougher, northern houses with the more gentile southern houses, but in this case they weren't consistent. Not that it spoiled anything for me, it's just if you think about it, it makes no sense!

The only other interesting accent I think in the show is Littlefinger's - it is not an accent I have ever heard! I know Aidan Gillen is Irish, and it definitely has an Irish lilt to it, but sometimes it comes out sounding vaguely Welsh, and sometimes southern, and sometimes northern. I mean, I think he's great as Littlefinger, and I put it down to "oh, he's from some really small town somewhere on the Fingers", but it does sometimes sound quite strange!

Just a random fact, the only Welshman on the show is (I believe) Iwan Rheon who plays Ramsay, who does a very good southern accent (even though he's meant to be from the north!) I believe that Iwan's mother tongue is actually Welsh, and that he only learnt English later. You can find clips of him interviewing in Welsh on the internet!

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