Thanks for that! It always bugs me when I hear a fantasy or science fiction character who seems to have been given an RP accent because that's all the director could think of to signal sophistication or gravitas. Somehow the most obnoxious are the ones played by children. Similarly with peasant characters in fantasy or science fiction settings who are given rural English accents because they're supposed to be medieval or something. I don't mind hearing English accents in Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, because those books seem like such products of English culture to me. On the other hand, the Elves, Dwarves and Rohirrim are not native speakers of the Common Tongue, so I would expect them to have L2 accents. I haven't seen or read /Game of Thrones/, but with American fantasy authors it just seems pretentious. An interesting contrast is the series /Firefly/ and its companion movie /Serenity/, which featured some Southern American accents to evoke the "space western" setting. -- -Angus B. Grieve-Smith [log in to unmask] ######################################################################## The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics. To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to: [log in to unmask] To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link: http://jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1