The phonology of the Northern, the Southern and the foreign in Game of Thrones

Abstract

When it comes to places and territories, much is at stake in Game of Thrones (henceforth, GoT) as the opening credits, which map out the narrative world of this series, make very clear to the audience. We argue that the accents spoken by the characters are part and parcel of the creation of the GoT universe and greatly contribute to anchoring the show at the historical, geographical and sociolinguistic levels. Indeed, with the advent of dialect coaches, accents have become a paramount component in actors and actresses’ performances, which are widely discussed online and evaluated as credible and deserving of awards, or, on the contrary, as completely off target and ridiculous. It consequently should not come as a surprise that GoT is a rich object of investigation for sociolinguists as accents are performed with specific purposes: to bring the audience to a different time (i.e. a pseudo-medieval era), to different places as the characters do not come from the same geographical areas and the plot unfolds over a rather large territory, and to different conclusions as to the moral values and personality traits of the different characters. There are many lay accounts of the actors and actresses’ accent performances, but the socio-phonological literature on this issue is still rather scarce. Fundamental research has been conducted into how the discourse features and pronunciation of TV series or cartoon characters reinforce stereotypes and are a shortcut to characterization (Lippi-Green 1997, 2012). However, to our knowledge, no systematic phonological, phonetic and sociolinguistic study of the accents in GoT has been published. This is precisely what we offer to do here.