Linguistic Profiling and Discrimination in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Abstract

This article examines the linguistic profiling in the video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with an interest in its possible useful appliance for a large gaming community with little knowledge of a fantasy world such as The Witcher’s. I work with the phenomenon of linguistic profiling as proposed by John Baugh, which will be used in conjunction with the dialects and accents used in The Witcher 3. Besides this, I use an interview of the translation and adaptation team from the game developers (CD Projekt Red) to showcase what considerations they made when choosing and distributing accents and dialects in the English version of the game. This paper concludes with detailing the problematic uses of accents and dialects in the game, while also highlighting the benefits to new players when orienting them in the Witcher world, which is the overall advantageous result from the accent distribution in the game.