Did Pirates Really Say "Arrrr"?

"Johnny Depp took home the best performance award at Sunday's MTV Movie Awards, for his role as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. (The third installment of the series topped the weekend box-office tallies again this past weekend, pulling in $43.2 million.) Depp's character famously speaks in a dissolute London mumble inspired by Keith Richards. But virtually all his crewmen hew to the classic movie-pirate patois, full of growled consonants and shiver-me-timbers slang. Wait, did pirates really say "arrrrr"?

Probably not. Both that phrase and the accent that goes with it are strictly Hollywood. They originated with Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in the movies and on TV through much of the 1950s. Newton was from Dorset, in the Cotswolds district of southwest England, and the regional accent he brought to the movies included a rolled "r."

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