Laurel MacKenzie, an expert in regional English and language change, delivers Pirate Lingo 101 for Talk Like a Pirate Day, the September 19 social media holiday devoted to the slang of the seas.
Talk Like a Pirate Day is an annual opportunity to pepper your speech with swashbuckling phrases like “ahoy matey” and “shiver me timbers.”
But where does “pirate speak” come from, and is this how historical pirates really talked?
In this video, , a New York University associate professor of linguistics who studies dialectology, language change, and varieties of English, explains the origins of some common pirate phrases and sounds—some dating back to the 1700s. Turns out a lot of it has to do with Hollywood:
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