MovieChat Forums > The Last Legion (2007) Discussion > British Accents in Medieval Rome??

British Accents in Medieval Rome??


I just watched this movie last night, and it would not have been so bad if not for all the British and Scottish accents. I mean, this is placed during the fall of the Roman Empire... I don't think Latin and Greek speaking people would have British accents... I don't care if they make movies like that in English (though I think there should be some in the original languages too...) but at least get the accents right! Then they go and make movies set in Britain and use American actors with terrible British accents. Oh Hollywood.

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I actually liked the accents quite a bit - at least it's better than having everyone speak in American accents (this happens in so many films it's not funny).

I think they probably went with the best option they had. ENGLISH as a language didn't even exist back then so how would we know how an Ancient Roman would sound like when speaking English? We don't even know how people in Ancient Rome spoke so it's rather impossible to even come up with a proper accent. ...People don't speak Latin anymore. If they did, we would actually have a fitting accent. But Latin is a dead language, and that means the accent is also dead. *shrug* That's the way I see it.

"Can you still see when your head has been severed from your neck? Let's find out..."
- Drancron

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[deleted]

Scottish accents ARE British.

Scotland is part of Britain (and England is another part of Britain).

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Well, some of it has to do with the actors they choose. Since it's classic adventure epic, they probably chose actors who had accents to play parts to give the film a kind of period authenticity.

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Modern accents didn't exist then. They would be all equally wrong. Hell, the British accent that British love to complain about when it comes to Americans didn't exist until the 19th century. Americans talk like Americans because we talk the same way we did when America was colonized. We didn't change our accents, the English did.

Most supposed "Americanisms" actually used to be Britishisms as well.


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Which of today's American accents (more accurately, dialects) is most like a "British" accent? Boston, Brooklyn, Vermont? The U.S. comprises a multitude of accents, not just a single, uniform American TV accent.

By the way, the British have lots of accents too.

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You really want to see a movie with people trying to fake ancient Roman or Greek accents but saying English dialogue? British accents get adopted for historical epics for some semblance of exotic classiness, and while it makes no sense as a convention, I don't see audiences responding to familiar actors adopting whatever historians deem is accurate whilst still speaking in English. The Passion of the Christ was entirely non-English, many people questioned the Irish accents built around Colin Farrell's to depict the Macedonians in Alexander, Russian accents in K-19 put people off for much of its running time and no one could decide if Tom Cruise not having any accent in Valkyrie was a good thing or not when he was surrounded by British actors but they were all playing Germans.
I accept the British accent conceit as just one of those things that happens a la Gladiator, but I also don't personally care if no one has an accent in a Hollywood historical film set in a time and place where no one would have been speaking English anyway.

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