I know that James Doohan was Canadian, but to my untrained ear, Scotty sounded more like Rory McIlroy than Gordon Ramsay. Am I off base here?
Scotty is Scottish.
However, you are not off base.
Years ago on Craig Ferguson’s show, he talked about how when they saw the Original Series Star Trek back home in Scotland, no one recognized Scotty’s accent. When they found out Scotty was supposed to be Scottish, they all wondered what had happened to him that he spoke so poorly. He may have been saying that as comedy or exaggeration but I don’t think he was impressed.
Doohan claimed he picked up the accent from a service buddy who hailed from Aberdeen, Scotland.
However, I asked a Scottish girl I once knew if it was authentic. She said “Not at all.”
Sure. For this century.
When Doohan was auditioning for the part, whose nationality had not yet been established, he read from the script in a number of accents that included Swedish and German. He was finally asked which nationality he thought the character should be and said “If he’s an engineer-r-r on a star-r-r ship, he ought to be Scottish.”
He essentially created his own character, like John Ratzenberger invented Cliff Cleven on Cheers.
It is Scottish to the same degree that Sean Connery’s accent is Russian in “The Hunt for Red October”, or Dick van Dyke’s was a “Cockerney”
i.e. nominally, but not actually.
I thought it was a pretty accurate representation of how North Americans in the '60s sounded when they put on a Scottish accent.
I recall a response to somebody identifying Scotty’s accent as “Aberdeen” – “Aberdeen Proving Ground, maybe”.
It’s about as Scottish as Chekov’s accent was Russian.
Or Patrick Stewart’s “French” accent?
Russian is super easy to learn; it is basically English if you just replace the the ‘v’ sound with ‘w’ and slur all your words like you’ve just downed a fifth of vodka. The real problem is that their keyboards are all defective so the letters are wrong or pushed together.
Stranger
Nucleeyur wessels. In Alameeda.
I came to mention this.
“We had no idea he was supposed to be Scottish. ‘Mom, why is the man with the Pakistani accent called Scotty?’”
I’ve heard it described as “Music Hall Scottish.”
Hah! Good point.
How authentic was Spock’s Vulcan accent?
Not bad. He sounded pretty close to Tuvok.
I’ll point out that Jean-Luc Picard was French. He was born in La Barre, France. He spent his entire childhood growing up on his family’s French vineyard.
So, then you might ask, why doesn’t he speak with a French accent? It’s because by the 24th century, French is an obscure local language that is rarely heard.
The show took care to address the discrepancy, although the way it did so was rather oblique. In The Next Generation, Season 1, Episode 3, “Code of Honor,” Data refers to French as “an obscure language,” which draws a brusque response from Picard. The obvious insult to Gallic pride notwithstanding, the exchange neatly explains away his English accent. If French were an obscure provincial language in the 24th century, Picard likely had to learn English before attending Starfleet Academy, and conceivably learned it so well that he could speak it without a trace of French.
Indeed, the notion holds up, even as the concept is stretched further. As a little-spoken language, French might not work with the universal translators, for instance, which explains why Picard mostly speaks English but occasionally lapses into (untranslatable) French. It also adds weight to his ambivalent attitude towards his family, who wanted him to work the vineyard and all but disowned him when he left for Starfleet.
Given that it is official on-screen canon that languages can and have changed dramatically from the 20th to the 24th century, it’s not that much of a stretch to presume that a Scottish accent might be different in the 23rd century (the time of TOS) than the 20th/21st century.
Consider that they’ve had the internet and social media for centuries. We’ve only had those things for decades. I expect it’s not that unrealistic for languages to change a lot as the world gets smaller.
That was how I explained Picard’s accent to myself. I just figured that by the 24th century the French accent had changed, and just happened to sound like a 20th century English accent.
Another explanation I’ve heard is that Picard is actually speaking French and his universal translator is translating it to English for us. He just has his translator set to received pronunciation.
Picard may have been French, but he clearly served in the British Royal Navy. Why else would he know the lyrics to “Heart of Oak”?
When it comes to Russian accents, I can assure you that the average Russian male trying to speak English sounds more like Steve Martin’s Georg Festrunk than Walter Koenig’s Pavel Chekov:
I always thought Ackroyd had the more convincing Slavic accent than Martin in those. He was much more comfortable with the accent, too. Steve Martin’s accents are generally terrible.
He also had a surprising fondness for Shakespeare. One might have expected a Frenchman to be more into someone like Moliere or Racine.