Where do you expect them to find English speaking children with a Scandinavian accent? lol.

They speak Imperial Common (English). Just like anyone else native to that language they do not speak with an accent.

One of my relatives lives in Denmark and their young son (think he's 11 or so) speaks English as do most of the kids in his school.

Youre right, and if English is their native language they probably dont have much of an accent.

for example I know a family of Ukrainians. The parents speak English with a very strong ukrainian accent. Their oldest son, who was born in Ukraine and learned English there as a second language and he speaks English with a moderate accent. Their youngest son, who was born here and learned both languages speaks English without an accent.

Since the Nords already speak English as their primary language, it wouldn't make any sense for the children to have any accent whatsoever.

the accents are all over the shop in this game anyway it seems most of the npc i talk to are a bad terminator impression or kovu from lion king 2 i dont get why they have lots of other good voice actors in the game but i allways seem to run in to these two

Actually the more you speak English the more your accent develops, becoming deeper and more consistent. There is no such thing as accentlessness.

The voice actors for the children have american accents.

The difficulty with finding children would be finding children who can speak English with a Scandinavian accent while remaining intelligible. advlts do this at times, because even when advlts become fluent in a foreign language and thoroughly intelligible they still tend to retain their native accent. I get the impression that when children learn a foreign language to the point of fluency, they also tend to learn to speak it with a native accent - so I wouldn't be surprised if (for example) Swedish schoolkids who learn English tend to learn the American (or English) accent around the same time they learn enough English to be able to do voiceover work.

Just a theory. Getting Swedish kids who barely spoke English would get you the accent, at the cost of being unintelligible, but if they got too good at English, they wouldn't have enough accent to bother using them. And how do you tell a Swedish kid who's fluent in American English, "Okay, that's great, now try and speak English with Swedish accent." I mean, I guess I could speak a little Spanish or German with a pronounced American accent, but making sure I could do so while remaining intelligible to somebody who spoke Spanish or German but no English? Not at all sure I could do that.

Lol considering "americans" are "new english" that dont make scense, that would mean the rest of the world have english accents hehehe. lol

You're right, but it isn't going to be mroe of a Nordic/Scandinavian accent, it's going to be more of an American English Accent and since that's what the Common language is...

Welcome to the topic.

THEY ARE KID VOICE ACTORS! BETH DOESN'T HAVE MUCH CHOICE!!

Speaking as someone who tries to avoid talking to children in real life, I for one would like to thank Bethesda for not wasting development dollars in finding and paying child actors to do 'realistic' Nordic accents. I personally like the old saw 'Children shouldn't speak unless spoken too'...and then I ignore them..forever! Seriously, this doesn't rise to the level of serious gripe; given there were 4 voice actors in Oblivion besides Captain Picard, I'm happy for the improvement I've seen.

Yes, thanks for bringing some real perspective. The voice acting in Oblivion was horrible. The only game I've seen with worse was Sins of a Solar Empire, which I consider an excellent game otherwise, just an excellent game with embarrassingly bad voice acting. I mean, literally embarrassing, boy-I-hope-somebody-doesn't-hear-this bad. In Oblivion I got sick of it as well. If anybody ever greets me with "Well met" I swear I'm gonna punch them right in the mouth.

It's because the children realize how stupid the advlts sound when they randomly try to pull off pseudo irish/austrian/romanian/british/scandinavian accents, and they've learned better.

I have a hard time taking this game seriously when I keep getting all my quests handed to me by ZEE TURRRMIN?TA. $50 says that the project directors told the voice actors to "sound european," and the result is we've got really bad attempts at all kinds of european accents.

What I don't get is that the Nords have any special accent at all. They're all obvious native Imperial Common speakers (without ever speaking or writing in any other language), it doesn't make sense for them to even have the accent that they have. They're native Imperial Common speakers, so they should speak that language without any other accent. If they were native speakers of Scandinavian who learned English it would make sense for them to have a scandinavian accent, but since I haven't met any of them that speak anything besides English, it's really silly if you think about it.

Funny. same thing was said for How to train your dragon.

Think of it this way; neither the US or Europe exist in the TES world. There is no such thing as an "American accent" on Nirn. So those bad Scandinavian accents you hear aren't bad Scandinavian accents. They're Nord accents. Problem solved. Case closed. Go cry about it.

It makes perfect sense. I'm from New Zealand, and English is the only language I know, but I don't sound like an Englishman. Accents are mainly caused by distance, not from learning another language first.

How can you assume what language they're speaking? Just because the game is using English (for the English-language version) that doesn't mean all English dialogue is "Common" or "Imperial" or whatever.

And even if Imperial were the usual second language for everybody in the Empire, it doesn't mean they'd all speak with the same accent. There are countries in Africa where everybody's first language is their tribal language, but everybody's second language is English, in order to communicate. That doesn't mean they're all going to speak English like a Brit or American or Aussie just because they've spoken English their entire lives.

Only when their balls drop do the get the awesome Arnie accents. That goes for the chicks too

This annoys me in most games that features children, don't get me wrong I'm truly enjoying Skyrim, but the laziness of creating 3 or 4 models then scatter them throughout the game world then hope no one notices, well, what can I say.

OT, Because the child voice actors they used were cheap.

I hate the American accents in Skyrim in general (not just the children - advlt NPCs too). It's a shame, because most of the other accents in the game sound perfect.

My point is that the Nords don't have and aren't speaking any other language. Why do they all of a sudden have a scandinavian accent when they'ce never had it in an Elder Scrolls game before? Is Scandinavian their primary/native language? No, it isn't, so why do they have that accent? I understand distancing causing an accent, but a scandinavian accent makes no sense whatsoever to begin with.

Can we just clarify that Arnold Schwarzeneggar is from Austria, a country quite far from Scandinavia?

It doesn't matter because Skyrim is nowhere near either of those places and the Nords don't speak Austrian or Scandinavian. THey're make-pretend people speaking with make-pretend accents.

I know, I just find the thought of a project director saying "try to sound european" entertaining, because now we have all sorts of voices that sound like very bad attempts at Romanian, Austrian, Irish, British and Scandinavian accents.