Why wasn't Picard a Brit?

Her accent wasn’t the problem; her acting style was. I’ve seen the clips of her from the pilot, and she comes off as a belivable Starfleet caption. She’d work better in a film than on TV.

It wouldn’t, and Picard’s accent wouldn’t sound like a modern Briton anymore than Queen Elizbath II sounds like Queen Elizabeth I. Ditto for the Americans. On the other hand nobody knows what English will sound like in the far future. Sure the writers can invent something, but you have the final segment of Cloud Atlas.

How much do we know about Picard’s mother? If she was English it would explain his accent as well his afinity for British culture and holiday traditions.

Would give this a thumbs up if I could.

Memory Alpha has a more accurate list of his credits.

And IMDB’s page for Roddenberry credits him as ‘creator’ (or ‘creator: Star Trek’), rather than writer on Voyager. The Voyager page clearly fell victim to the lazy expansion that a lot of series did when they started adding individual episode credits.

Well, yeah. What I’m saying is that there was no reason to change his name. Just say he’s an Englishman named Picard.

Jean-Luc Picard speaks French in English. He is the most interesting man in the Federation.

Which is a continuity problem all on its own. If everyone was speaking their own native language and it was being translated, why did they occasionally say something that was in their native language and required them to translate for everyone else? Worf, for example, would occasionally say something in Klingon. If everything he was saying was in Klingon, why did the universal translator skip what he was saying at that particular time?

I always wondered this myself. Let’s blame it on a computer glitch. The future computers were always screwing up, making holograms real and murderous, etc.

Not to mention that the UTs are built into the combadges, yet nobody had any trouble communicating when those badges were taken away. Or that all Starfleet computer displays are in English; as well as the lettering on outside of the ships.

I’m not really sure that’s a problem. Most non-native English speakers speak in something akin to their native accent but many don’t. My brother in law is German, learned English in his teens, and most Irish people don’t catch that he’s not Irish. A lot of well educated kids from across the non-English speaking world have perfect British, American etc. accents when speaking English and that’s now. Give it another couple of hundred years and who knows what you’d get.

I have a French friend in her mid 20s, grew up in France but who now splits her time 50/50 between London and Paris. She speaks flawless English with an English, even slightly London, accent. She’s an actress who doesn’t want to get stuck playing French women, so has worked at it, but it’s certainly possible.

There was indeed. (TNG: “Code of Honor” Aka, the racist episode with black natives hitting on our white women.)

Hence it has always been my head canon that French died out as first language and was only kept alive by devoted French people who used it as a second language. They must’ve been pretty devoted, too, as younger Picard always had more a French accent, as did his nephew (played by the same actor).

The Tsiolkovskii had Russian lettering: Циолкoвский.

He doesn’t always drink tea, but when he does, it’s Earl Grey - hot.

Going by what James Blish implied in one of his Trek books, everyone in the Federation (or in contact with it) knew at least some “Basic,” the dumbed-down version of English proposed for international use after WWII.

Klingons, of course, like most foreigners in movies and on TV, generally prefer to speak English even when they’re alone. :smiley:

With its inconsistent pronunciation and loose grammar, it’s a warrior’s language.

Yeah, but who wants soggy inertia lying around?!? :stuck_out_tongue:

I entered this thread just to share this fact but now I’ll comment that Futurama pulled the same joke.

He did try speaking with a French accent prior to shooting. It was decided that Picard would just speak with no accent rather than talk like Inspector Clouseau.

“Playing Shakespeare?” We watched the whole series on Netlfix recently. Most interesting was Stewart and David Suchet (from Poirot) both doing Shylocks speeches. (And passing a yamulke to show who was Shylock and who was doing the other characters.)

In any case, given that Picard and his brother spoke English to each other in France, I assume that English has taken over, and that French and other languages have become like Yiddish in my family - just a faint memory. In TOS time foreign language speakers had accents still, like Scott and Chekov, but even those are gone by TNG time.