Carnival Row accents

The period fantasy thriller Carnival Row is the latest addition to Amazon Prime Video and while it’s set in its own universe it still features some very distinct accents from the real world. Obviously both Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne don’t really talk the way they do in the show, but they’re doing a pretty good job of putting on accents to bring the series to life.

If you’re from any of the locations where the accents come from you may well be little bit more critical of the cast, but everyone else you probably won’t notice a thing. They may not be up there with Brad Pitt’s efforts in Snatch, but they are still pretty good. They also work well to provide distinction between the different races in the Burgue and the Fae world of Tirnanoc.

Vignette Stonemoss and the faery accents

For the most part, the faeries of Tirnanoc, including Vignette, have fairly broad Irish accents, which ties in with the link to Irish mythology that has been used for the name of their homeland. Tirnanoc comes from a mythical place in Irish folklore called Tír na nÓg which is the home of magical fairy creatures with distinct similarities to the backstory of Carnival Row.

Cara Delevingne is actually from London, so it’s pretty impressive that she’s managed to pull off a half decent Irish accent. However it’s not just her, a lot of the faery folk that are introduced in the story have Irish accents, including the witch Haruspex Aoife Tsigani – played by South African actress Alice Kringe, who you might recognise as the Borg queen from Star Trek First Contact – and.

However, it isn’t all cut and dried, because her best friend and former lover Tourmaline – played by Karla Crome, who is also from London – doesn’t have an Irish accent at all. Instead, she sounds like she’s got a North London accent, which stands in stark contrast to the lilting Irish tones of Vignette. The only explanation we can come up with is that faeries from different areas of Tirnanoc have different accents. Those from the Tirnanese Highlands in the Kingdom of Anoun, where Vignette is from, sound Irish, while those from where Tourmaline is from sound like North Londoners. 

There’s only a very brief mention of Tourmaline’s province, which she refers to as something sounding like Giersh in Episode 3. You can follow the official Twitter page at https://twitter.com/CarnivalRow for more on the cast, or read our Carnival Row universe, backstory and history post to find out more about the show.

Philo and the Burguish accents

Philo and the general people of the Burgue all seem to have fairly broad cockney accents, which links the city to the people of London in the UK. However, they aren’t the only accents for people of that live in the capital city as there appears to be a fairly significant class divide in place around Carnival Row with the upper classes having more of a snooty British accent tying them in with the Aristocracy of the British Empire during Victorian era England.

This builds nicely on the ties with empire building, which is a big part of the history behind the series. Tirnanoc was initially a closed out continents where the natives lived peacefully until the arrival of the empires of man who warred over the land’s riches, much in the same way that the British, French and Dutch Empires did in our own history.

Other Carnival Row accents

The only other significant accents in Carnival Row is that of the Pucks and while they originate from Tirnanoc much like the faeries they don’t have the same Irish charms. Instead, they’ve got various British accents with no single fixed origin. Afissa, Imogen Spurnrose’s maid, has a midlands accent, while Quill the Puck fires by the Chancellor is Scottish. Agreus is more well-to-do like the Spurnroses and Cabal, the head of the Puck rebellion, sounds slightly Northern. There’s doesn’t seem to be any real explanation for this in the show as such, but you can probably assume that they all come from different areas within the Carnival Row universe.

We’re expecting the show to introduce new people, characters and lands in Series 2 of the show, so there are bound to be a number of new accents involved. We’ll update things here as they become known, probably with the arrival of the first trailer for the second season, which is bound to be 2020 at the very earliest.

You can check out Series 1 of Carnival Row on Amazon Prime at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07S47J47H.