Queen's Latin

Common card · No. 400455

The Queen's Latin is a trope in film, television, plays, and video games in which characters in historical drama or historical fantasy settings speak with British accents, particularly Received Pronunciation (RP), despite not being British and the story not being set in Britain. Sometimes referred to as imperial RP, ancient RP, Roman RP, or medieval RP, the trope is commonly associated with depictions of ancient civilizations, classical antiquity, medieval Europe, and fantasy worlds inspired by pre-modern societies, though it has been most strongly associated with the Roman Empire. Some commentators have argued that British speech patterns are often perceived as formal, neutral, and sufficiently detached from everyday modern non-British speech to evoke a distant historical or fictional setting, as well as to convey authority, sophistication, villainy, or dramatic gravitas in English-language cinema, regardless of the setting or nationality of the characters. The convention also reflects...

Read on Wikipedia · Image by Albert Kretschmer, painters and costumer to the Royal Court Theatre, Berlin, and Dr. Carl Rohrbach., Public domain