Of Wizards and Time-Lords

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

However, apparently England English middle class people tend to look down on the accents that these characters speak - the Doctor sounds like he's from the North, which I'm assuming is subconsciously "uncool", and Rose sounds lower class. It would be really cool if someone from thereabout could actually confirm the influence of their accents, but at least this is supposed to be the theory.

Interestingly, I was going over the first chapter of Book Five of The Lord of the Rings the other day and it's worth noting how often the Men of Gondor point out that Pippin speaks Westron with a different accent to them, something not always remarked upon elsewhere in the text. Beregond observes that "strange accents do not mar fair speech". Linguistic diversity is obviously important to Professor Tolkien, and here it seems to also extend to accent as well.

It's worth noting that in Classic Doctor Who, the first to sixth Doctors all spoke "BBC English", which is to say that they spoke with the "Received Pronunciation" accent which BBC Newsreaders and the like also used. Part of the point of this was because BBC programming was often aired all over the world, and a clear and precise accent was intended to be easier for a variety of language backgrounds to understand. Within the show, it was not until Fourth Doctor serial "The Masque of Mandragora" that an attempt was made to explain why the Doctor and his companions can understand all languages: "It's a Time Lord gift I allow you to share." The New Series later changed this to the TARDIS translating everything. At other times the Doctor was shown to not do this; the Third Doctor speaks mainland Chinese to a Chinese government representative in "The Mind of Evil", for instance, and it is untranslated for the audience.

Obviously it's a convenience, but one aspect of Doctor Who's general celebration of exploration and thus difference and diversity which might be a little limited is its exploration of language, which has not always received that much attention. The New Series has, I think, explored this a little more than Classic did. Professor Tolkien, by contrast, loved diversity of language and different languages, and this is reflected in his fiction. At the same time, however, he also has the convenience of a "Common Speech" in his writing, be it Sindarin in the First Age or Westron in the Third, which allows for convenience in communication. In that sense, perhaps both explore the role of language in the creation of the Secondary World, although it might be said that Professor Tolkien celebrates it a little more.