Aren’t we just supposed to develop a blind spot to the whole issue of language in the Star Trek universe, I mean, the universal translator is a convenient device, but are we to believe that it also makes the speaker’s lips move in sync with the translation?
[Additional nitpick] King Arthur was (supposedly, he’s not an accurately documented historical figure) king of the Britons, not king of Britain. Similar word, same root, different meaning.
Whoever Arthur was, he didn’t have what you’d call today a British accent, any more than a Scottish one. He wasn’t “British”.
Well I didn’t vote for him.
I digress, slightly; but if Genevieve Boujold hadn’t jacked it in after a few days and been replaced by Kate Mulgrew, the captain in Star Trek: Voyager would have spoken with a French-Canadian accent.
You don’t vote for king.
didn’t know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.
You’re fooling yourself. We’re living in a dictatorship, a self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes…
Oh, there you go bringing class into it again.
[sub]PLEASE make it stop[/sub]
Granted that the explanations given make as much sense as anything in Star Trek, I’ve still always wondered why Roddednberry and the producers didn’t just sidestep the whole thing by making the character English upon Stewart being cast for the role. I mean, it’s not as if being French played a major part in his characterization. It came up a few times, but I think they could have made him English without any real difference in the overall series. (The only loss I can think of would be Q asking for “John Luck Pickerd” in the Picard-in-the-Accademy episode, which would have been too obvious with an aristocratic English name.) I suspect that they originally planned to make him more obviously “French,” and then changed their minds. Still, he drank tea instead of wine: he was English in everything but name!
It is pretty obvious why Picard is a Frenchman who speaks with an English accent & drinks tea: sometime in the next couple hundred years the United Kingdom conquers France, and forces everyone there to speak English.
Considering Janeway is a small town (or maybe even rural – I’m not sure) Indiana girl, that would have been an interesting dichotomy. No worse than the Picard one stated in the OP but interesting nevertheless.
Or maybe Canada just gets tired of our shit sometime in the 21st Century, declares war, winds up conquering the Ohio River valley and its surrounding areas, and settles it with Quebecois?
Alan Smithee: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/st/interviews/justman/page6.shtml
That’s the Bob Justman interview I linked to earlier. It explains the rationale and circumstances behind the whole situation.
Picard surrendered to the enemy within the first hour of his very first appearance.
He’s French.
Okay, Okay. I know I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.
Help, help, I’m being repressed!
Worf’s adoptive parents speak with russian accents, but his brother (Serge Rozenkho?) speaks with an american accent.
Picard’s mother, seen in a dream sequence, speaks with a french accent.
Within one or two generations ago global uniformity negated regional cultural diversity. 
Isn’t that exactly how you’d expect him to talk? OK, so he’s French, and he learned English. He uses English all of the time for his job, so he learned it very well, enough that his French accent doesn’t show through. And what variety of English would one expect him to have learned? It’s a lot more reasonable for him to use the dialect from just across the Channel than the one from the other side of the Atlantic.
In actual fact, I once knew a lady who was born and raised French, but from her voice I’d have sworn she was English. For exactly the reasons outlined above about Picard, so it does happen in real life.
from here (go to the “Data” section)
Chronos is right; people who learn a foreign language very well tend to take on the accent of whoever they learn it from. While I lived in Europe, I met quite a few people who spoke English with American or British accents yet were neither American nor British. One of my roomates was a Norwegian girl who spoke English with a absolutely dead-on California valley girl accent, all the way down to the “oh mah Gawd!” If Picard’s native language was French but he had also learned to speak English very well, it’s perfectly reasonable for him to have learned to speak it with an accent.
Long ago, in a remote past, Peckerd the Pickle Pecker Picker had a transporter accident with Malcolm Reed. It’s canon, I tell you!
Okay, it isn’t.
Real story is that the French had yet another revolution. Seems they didn’t even have a language of their own, just this see-lee oc-sent, youi see. They lost, and most of them died or moved to Port Nechez Grove, TX where the excelled at football on a high school level, finally beating Odessa-Permian.
Okay, okay… Stewart is cool. Looks cool, sounds cool. Both his voice and accent add to the aura of calm control which his character projects. Tho…, I do so enjoy it when he gets mad. “NO MORE! The line is drawn HERE!”
I watched part of the Actor’s Studio episode with Charlize Theron. I had to stop because James Lipton was annoying as hell, but Charlize said when she was a kid in South Africa she didn’t speak English very much outside of school. She certainly sounds like an American born speaker now, though, so much that when I first saw her in whatever movie I didn’t know she was a foreigner.
A friend of mine met someone in Costa Rica (I think) who taught himself English by watching John Wayne movies, so he sounded like John Wayne.