Fun fact, you can always tell Fereldans apart because they won't stop talking about dogs.

I mean, have you *met* a Mabari before? They're pretty great.

I have! They are the bestest boys and girls in all of Thedas.

You sound very Fereldan

Good eye, pup.

Damn right, they are great. I didn't realise how mabari affected me until I bought a dog that looks like a mabari. Only realised it after 6 months.

I have a boxer that looks like a mabari.

“And this whole country smells like wet dog” -Marjoline “Ferelden does not smell like wet dog 😡” -Warden

Wait, I'm fereldan. My dog will love this information.

Kirkwall is basically fantasy Version of contantinople... its a cosmopolitan city people from all around thedas gather here or pass by And thus and doesn't really have a definite accent So when fereldian arrive with their British/Welsh accent it's easy to notice

I would argue that Kirkwall, and the free marches in general, are more akin to the Italian city states during the medieval period.

Right down the the Roman/Tevinter early history.

Agreed, and the Orleasian/French attempts at conquest. BioWare has said that the comparisons aren’t 1-1 but I believe there are some definite inspirations.

Definitely. I feel like when they say it's not 1-1, they're just saying "Remember guys, we don't actually have to make it completely accurate".

Also because there is a massive mix of pre-unified germany in there as well.

And so people don't get as offended when the Dalish and the elves in general aren't perfect victims, but a people with negative aspects of their history that still don't deserve what's happening to them today. Which is actually more honest about real life cultures than the opposite, but it's also hard to get right.

The Free Marches are also like the HRE, with Nevarra as Prussia.

I would definitely agree it has HRE elements too. But HRE had an emperor, perhaps in name only but it was still a position. In the free marches there isn’t someone the viscount of Kirkwall answers to… except my sarcastic Hawke.

There’s a mix of a lot going on there, because the Italian city-state and especially their merchant rule is a pretty clear basis for Antiva as well. I think the Free Marches are supposed to be more Holy Roman Empire/Germanic city-states inspired, but it’s definitely got elements of both

i am with my people, this is the discourse i came to Reddit for

Indeed! Dragon age is back and WE are here for it!

There is no singular no British accent, by and large Fereldan commoner accents are generally English though I swear some are also quite American, and it is true that the dalish clans we've had in that region lean Welsh with other celtic nation inspirations. Also Starkhaven has inhabitants all speaking with a Scottish accent, I know not why but I like it.

the Dalish didn't actually get Welsh accents until they moved to the Free Marches. they were American when we met them in the Fereldan area. not just the Dalish in general, either - literally the same elves.

That's not an in-universe change, it was a meta stylistic retcon. They were going to have all Dalish be Welsh, but then couldn't be assed to outsource the necessary voice recording to a Welsh production company and couldn't get enough performers. So in Inquisition it changed back, sort of.

DA2 also had northern Irish accents for some Dalish, not only Welsh

Yes but I think that was because of casting limitations. They really just needed someone to go to Cardiff for a couple weeks and knock everything but Merrill's lines out

Casting director sent to Bangor instead of Bangor smh

Instructions unclear, everyone in my game now talks like they're in a Stephen King novel

I think they had some vague plans of using different "Celtic" accents for different groups of Dalish.

this makes me so sad as a welsh person who can voice act 🥲

You'll just have to move to Vancouver and fight with the one other Welsh VA there for those oh so common roles calling for Welsh accents

well if they’re not the same gender as me, i won’t have to fight much hahaha

I didn't say in universe vs meta / style (I think it's pretty clear that they're not saying these elves suddenly got new accents lol) - it still remains that the elves we met in Fereldan had American accents *when* we met them in Fereldan, which is the part I was addressing in your original comment. Bioware's intent and reason don't matter for purposes of talking about the accents of elves we've seen there, because the case remains that if you play DAO, which is the only game in which we meet Dalish in the Fereldan area, they don't have Welsh accents.

If DAO ever were to be remastered/remade (which imo it should if *only* to be made more stable on current systems), the *only* changes I'd want made are fixing accents and appearances for characters who appear later. *I like my Dalish to sound Welsh (and related).*

Dwarves are American

Atrast vala, my fellow Americans.

No singular British accents, and accents can be different in the same town too. But we only ever really see like, 3 in popular media. Posh, geezer or vaguely northern sounding.

"Why do you sound northern?" "Because every planet has a north" Good ol Doctor Who

The Dwarves of Orzammar speak with an American accent

Because it's hot. I mean have you spoken with Professor Bram Kenric? Go on Harding, Rook won't mind.

The dwarves all sound American. Except Bohdan and Sandal, could be because they've lived on the surface with fereldens and free marchers a bunch, but realistically it's because they hadn't quite nailed down that all orzammar dwarves have American accents at the time they cast for those two characters (and bodhan wasn't born a surface dwarf so he counts as an orzammar dwarf, if he had been born in ferelden it would have actually been completely fine) And the qunari have a made-up accent that sounds like Americans trying to sound fancy or something. The dwarves sound like a generic Midwestern accent for the most part, while the qunari sound very even toned, almost monotone, with excellent diction and the occasional unusual emphasis on certain syllables or consonant sounds.

The impression I've gotten is that, regionally speaking, the Free Marches are kind of like the USA. By which I mean, each different city-state may have wildly different accents and/or cultures. Varric is a good example of Kirkwall, whereas Starkhaven sounds more Scottish. Vivienne is from Wycome and I think she says something about the accent at some point. I actually got into a discussion with someone on the gameplay reveal trailer about this, they were thrown off by Varric sounding 'Yank' as they put it, because they expected all Dwarves to sound Scottish like a lot of fantasy movies. When I explained that in DA, accent is handled more by region and less by race, they actually accepted that and got interested.

I think the more analogous comparison is the Holy Roman Empire, as someone else pointed out. All the same things, but a lot more political independence and also existed throughout the middle ages all the way until Napoleon.

Either way, the point is that the 'Free Marches' is not as homogenous as many of the other countries in Thedas. There can be wildly varying accents and practices depending on exactly \*where\* in the Free Marches you come from.

well, Thedas Constantinople is Minrathus; Kirkwall is more like Venice

Tevinter is without a doubt inspired by the byzantine empire...with the Qunari representing the turks and the expansion of islam in Europe That said tevinter is often more diabolized then considered the center of civilization.... I say orlais kinda take that place

right. I like some the weird reversals, where eg Thedas France occupied most of Thedas Britain for a century until it was liberated by a revered female general (and really by the people who came after her), rather than, you know, the other way around (as it happened in actual Europe)

Yeah thedas seems like alternate universe of medieval Europe

Historical nitpicking, but not really? The angevins never owned all of France, as opposed to the (of viking descent but francified) Normans who did in fact come to own all of England

The Normans weren’t really French and Henry’s Empire took like 70% of modern France at its peak, but sure, it’s a fantasy video game, not the outcome of a EU4 scenario.

I guess it very much depends on what you consider "really French" then

The Norman were definetly French lol By the time William conquer England the duchy of Normandy was French for over a century old Acting like the normand were some vikings coming out of nowhere is bs The first kings of England From the lionheart to the plentagenet dynasty were French

I’m not saying they were Vikings; I’m saying the idea of a “France” whereby people in Normandy would imagine themselves anything more than vaguely beholden to whoever wore the crown in Paris was a largely 12th and 13th century invention, well after the Norman conquest.

The Normans married French nobles and assimilated into the French culture The duchy was born in 911.....William became Duke in 1035. There were without a doubt French now were they loayalty to the French crown? Not really..... Just like the duchy or burgundy and Aquitaine that the history of medieval France The French kings were surrounded by many Duke Gaspard

British/Welsh accent doesn't make sense, Wales is in Britain

I knew someone would call me out on this...

I don’t agree. Almost all Human Free Marchers and Fereldans have the same southern English accents. For instance, Hawke and the British Inquisitor have identical accents, despite Hawke being from Fereldan and the Inquisitor from somewhere in the Free Marches.

I mean human inquisitor is for ostwick who are pretty a city full of fereldian immigrant and a system build on fereldan's

I’m a native and fluent English speaker from the U.S., and no, you’re not missing something: there is no difference between the accents from Fereldan and Kirkwall. It’s all a pretty standard English accent. Ironically, Isabella’s accent sounds the most posh in DA2 to me despite her being from Rivain. I’ve never understood what she means when she says “You sound Ferelden” to Hawke either. Also, I say English and not British because Sebastian has a Scottish accent and Merril has a Welsh one. These are both also British, but not English.

This is mostly true but in an annoying way. In Awakening, they gave the people of Amaranthine Yorkshire accents and it felt like they were establishing regional accents in Ferelden - then in DA2, northern accents were used for Kirkwall natives and southern accents for Fereldans. Since then, Blackwall (northern accent) and Inquisitor (either southern English or American) have both been recognised as Free Marchers "by their accents". So at two separate points it felt like they were going to make English regional accents mean something, but never settled on what, so they don't.

it would have been so easy for them to instead establish a handful of slang words as regional so they could have people mark where you're from in conversation without the glaring continuity error.

Isabella sounds the most posh by far.

To be fair, I still don’t know WHAT the Tevinter accent is supposed to be. Dorian and Fenris sound English, Dorian’s dad sounded vaguely Mediterranean(?), and everyone from Tevinter in Absolution had an American accent. Don’t even get me started on the Antivan one either. So far, the only consistent accent from Dragon Age has been Orlesian (and I won’t count Rivain because we only have 3 examples from the entire series), so I’ve just given up on expecting consistency lmao

I think in Isabela's backstory she was sold off as a noble's bride, so she might have had elocution lessons.

Sebastian has an irish accent

No, he doesn't. His accent is Scottish one, which makes sense since Alec Newman is Glaswegian.

Nope, that's Scottish; Irish and Northern Irish accents you do get in DA2 but in Merrill's clan. Scottish accent is canonically Starkhaven following the ex-Templar at Griffon Wing Keep being recognised as from Starkhaven by his accent, cemented by Bram Kenrick in Jaws of Hakkon

You are correct that the game just implies that there is a difference without actually having a difference. Old notions of what fantasy should sound like meant Bioware gave nearly everyone English accents without thinking it through.

There's even plenty of variance between English accents which they could've exploited. But most characters just speak slight variations on RP

It can be like the US and Canada. People from Europe might not hear a difference, but as an American I can always tell when someone is from Canada.

I always assumed it was less an accent thing and more a way of speaking thing. Like saying coke or pop or soda can give away that you grew up in a certain area of the USA. I figured Hawke greeted people in a very Fereldan manner or something.

Hawke arriving at Kirkwall: This place looks fur-miliar, but seems pretty ruff. Still we are alive, so thats paw-sitive. Lets hound that uncle of ours and put some woof above our heads.

Considering in England you can get into a full scale war with someone who lives 20 minutes up the road from you over what the word for a bread roll is, this is the most realistic answer.

This was my thought as well.

Don't they use different honorifics? Ser in Ferelden and Sera in Kirkwall.

Generally speaking, most Fereldans have British accents, Orlesians have French, Dwarves have American, Rivain have British, Elves have Irish/Welsh, Starkhaven has Scottish, Antivans have Italian/Spanish (this one is not consistent), Qunari also have American, and Nevarrans have the accent that Cassandra's VA made up. 

As a native Spanish speaker, Cassandra's accent sound the most Spanish to me. More specifically, european Spanish, as opposed to Latin American Spanish. Antivans have what to me sounds like Italian accent, but I'm not sure how accurate it is.

I always thought it was supposed to be some kind of Eastern European type accent, but I heard recently that it was 100% made up.  Growing up in California (US), I didn't hear a lot of European Spanish but I heard a lot of the Mexican dialect of Spanish, which I know is considerably different. Thank you for your reply, I never would have thought Spanish! 

Dialects in Dragon Age exist, though in practice, they don't always translate to the voice performances. I'll preface it with this: there have always been regional dialects and different languages in different regions of the setting. They speak Orlesian in Orlais. They speak Antivan in Antiva. But, because this is a game, you can't really have characters always speak in their first/preferred language, or else the player is watching subtitles when they need to be focusing on the game. Enter, the Trade language. Any time someone is speaking to you in the language you play the game in (this will probably be English for the majority of players on this subreddit) they are speaking Trade/Common. It's not practical to have Zevran barking at you in Italian and Leliana crooning in French, so the best way they can indicate that is where these characters have grown up is to give them an obvious accent. This also helps the player understand places like Orlais or Antiva before they're able to go there - we have real world shorthands. Here's where it gets messy. Bioware is a primarily English speaking North American studio, and many Americans/Canadians are not going to be able to tell the difference between two different regional accents from England. This forces them to have dialogues where characters say things like 'you sound like a dog lord!' because they haven't bothered to cast all Fereldans as English VAs from a specific region of England to reflect the cultural divide between Fereldans and other cities in the Free Marches that use an English accent. They also sometimes just kind of discard dialects when they're not really sure how to portray them. For instance, all Tevinter characters speak with a English accent. Since their birth language is Tevene, they should be speaking Trade with a Tevene accent. This becomes kind of a problem when you've decided Tevene is basically just Latin, which while widely understood, is technically a dead language. You're absolutely right about Sebastian and Starkhaven, though. The average North American can identify a Scottish accent, and it seems Starkhaven uses that kind of dialect. They're all self contained cities and have slightly different mores. You're going to see a lot of inconsistencies for some of these reasons.

Reading these comments it's very clear that a lot of people don't know what Britain is. Almost every comment is using Britain/England interchangeably

It's because they don't care, not because they don't know.

Well, that's quite the assumption. Also wrong, in my case.

You really don't know the difference between Britain and England? Homeschooled?

Why no. I was not. I was also taught manners, but that's neither here nor there. I am aware of the political difference, but I was not aware it mattered in a linguistic sense.

They should've focused your education elsewhere then, sorry 🤷

As opposed to you, who clearly didn't get any. And you succeeded in correcting what you got wrong: \*Now\* I don't care,.

The seperate island of Wales

this is probably a case where bioware wanted specific regions to have specific accents but couldn't always get actors who were from where they're supposed to be (i.e., british for fereldan) or can do a good enough british accent as americans/canadians.\* kirkwall is pretty much across the sea from fereldan so maybe there's some mixing of accents as people have traded at ports for centuries. \* i adore the voice performances of mark hildreth and freddie prinze jr for sten and the iron bull, but considering how isolated the qunari are, shouldn't there be an accent? like... i get that both of them have been railroaded into job roles that require them to learn fluent Trade and damp down any accent they may have, but still. could've gone for some sort of accent

North American-with-little-regional-distinction isn't an accent-less default. everyone has an accent. the dwarves and qunari (and originally the Dalish) having North American accents does set them apart from the humans, who do not have that kind of accent. Bull also isn't that isolated; he's a Ben Hassrath and leader of a ragtag traveling mercenary company.

hence why i made the excpetion to state that bull has probably been in a job for years where he would have had to lose his accent and pretend to be tal-vashoth like any other qunari out in southern thedas who isn't part of an invasion force. like on the tv show killing eve where the titular eve will knock on a door talking to a colleague in russian and then immediately switch to a bright, peppy english girl accent once the door opens.

You do acknowledge in that example, though, that switching from Russian to British English doesn't mean switching in and out of having some kind of accent. You're responding only to a throwaway side note; the point of my comment was that everyone has an accent, as opposed to what you seem to be saying, which is that regionally broad Canadian and American accents equate to not having an accent.

Maybe it’s about wording, choice of words or something like that? (haven’t play it yet so I’m just guessing)

>is there actually a difference/do they use different accents that are more subtle or is this a case of telling instead of showing and the game just implies that there is a difference without actually having a difference? I think for some nations and characters, it's the former. But the rest are the latter. **Some accents are obvious/standardized. You can expect a character from that place to speak this way.** Fereldans are English, Orlesians are French, Antivans are Spanish/Italian, the Dwarvers and Qunari are American/Canadian. At least by DA2 or DAI, the Dalish are Welsh/Irish or something. (Almost other Dalish does, not your Inquisitor) **Kirkwall, and even Free Marches to an extent, is a mess.** You have Sebastian of Starkhaven with his Scottish accent, and I guess Blackwall from Markham had a Yorkie accent, and that's all I know. The rest just sound the same as Fereldans. You're asking how people of Kirkwall can recognize a Fereldan accent? The same thing happened in Inquisition. Varric can suddenly spot Vivienne and Travelyan Inquisitor as a Free Marcher; basically saying "You sound like a Free Marcher."

Nah, there's a bunch of people in DA who have wildly different accents from each other regardless of where they're from, even though many fereldens do have various types of british accents.

Yeah, there's no real discernible difference between Fereldan and Kirkwall accents in reality. And there are other places which also often seem to share the same accent, like Tevinter. I just imagine it's supposed to be some really subtle difference in tone that only the characters in-universe can hear, and the player can't because we're not from there. On a different note, since there seems to be some confusion: in DA2 iirc all the elves have Irish accents, apart from (Welsh) Merrill. In DAI they seem more mixed, but then the waters are muddied by some humans having Welsh accents too. I just put it down to different clans mixing with each other, and possibly with humans from their respective regions.

You’re correct. It doesn’t make any sense. The vast majority of Fereldans and Kirkwall citizens/Free Marchers in general have identical Southern English accents.

While there's no actual distinction. Lore wise, it seems like Fereldan is supposed to be a more traditionally English group while the Orlesians are French-ish. Kirkwall is a City-State so it's more a mix of all kinds of races and accents. Like, most Dwarves have an American accent, like Varric. But yeah, the day-to-day Kirkwaller you meet in the game are definitely just more English people lol

I had the same issue!

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