George Choundas - The pirate primer: mastering the language of swashbucklers and rogues

You hold in your hands the world's only complete guide to the pirate language.

But this begs the question: Is there such a thing as a pirate language?

The short answer is yes. If one were to take the statements made by or attributed to English-speaking pirates in historical accounts, literature, film, and television and then distill and identify all those words and patterns that are distinctive from or used with disproportionate frequency as compared with modern English, the resulting compilation would be a freestanding pirate language. This is precisely what the Primer does.

The long answer is also yes, with stops along the way. The term language suggests a uniform way of talking. But not every pirate speaks in the same way. Not every pirate uses the same words or pronunciations. Not every pirate sounds like Long John Silver (played by Robert Newton) in Walt Disney's 1950 production of Treasure Island or hails from Bristol or the southwestern parts of England. Many or most of the pirates in film, television, and literature are obviously colorful stereotypes, not authentic representations of the diverse breed of criminals who actually sailed the seas. In his book Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of LifeAmong the Pirates, David Cordingly writes of the pirate we all know: Over the years fact has merged with fiction. The picture [of pirates] which most of us have turns out to be a blend of historical facts overlaid with three centuries of ballads, melodramas, epic poems, romantic novels, adventure stories, comic strips, and films. (xiii-xiv)

The truth, however, is that heterogeneity is a feature of every language. A New Yorker's vowels are generally not the same as a San Franciscan's, and the vocabulary of a college graduate in either city will likely vary from that of the high-school drop-out living across the street. Pirates similarly hailed from different places, ethnicities, and educational backgrounds (see introduction to Chapter 17: Pronunciation), which makes the consequently diverse elements of their speech all the more interesting.

Pirate speech varies even among pirates in the same company: Treasure Island's Israel Hands uses distinctive terms and patterns more frequently than Long John Silver; The Pirate Round's Henry Nagel speaks more piratically than his pretentious boss Elephiant Yancy. And just as a stockbroker might speak differently with important clients at a meeting than with colleagues at a sports bar, oftentimes the same pirate speaks more piratically with certain people (Treasure Island's Long John Silver with Israel Hands, Winds of Chance's Japhet Bly with his messmates) than with others for whom he might consider standard English more appropriate (Long John Silver with Captain Smollett, Japhet Bly with Ursula Revell).

The term language also suggests a communal way of speaking. Frenchmen say oui to communicate with their compatriots because French is their common, official language. One might observe that pirates, on the other hand, often say things not because they are members of the pirate community, but because they are seamen (fair winds and following seas) or eighteenth-century Englishmen (alack now) or for any number of other reasons. The reality, however, is that, beyond (and sometimes even within) a very basic vocabulary of core terms, every language contains elements mirroring the non-ethnic, non-geographic identities of its speakers their other affiliations, interests, beliefs, pursuits. French doctors and lawyers, for example, communicate in sub-vocabularies better attributable to their professions than to any shared geography or ancestry. And, conversely, the pirate language includes a certain core vocabulary of terms spoken by pirates