(Title should say “modern”, not “modem”) I haven’t thought about this until now, but no other pop culture historical archetype that I can think of has a particular dialect exclusively associated with it. Sure, when little kids pretend to be cowboys they’ll put on a Texas accent or when they dress up as knights they’ll do an upper class British accent etc. These are based on our conceptions of who these people were and where they came from. But to modern minds, the pirate voice is just...the pirate voice. It sounds to my lay ear like it is at least partially grounded in Early Modern English pronunciation, but most people outside of linguistics circles probably aren’t acquainted enough with the history of English to think of dawning the pirate voice in the same way as in my other examples. So, who started this trend?