Why is Picard... French?

[Captain Picard's Hair]

I'd take that class if I were an actor.

[Thorin]

Does that mean he has to teach a class?

Well, he is the Chancellor too, so he can do what the hell he wants
Saying that he actually does do lectures more often than you'd suspect.

[Mikey]

That's great to hear - my already high opinion of him just went up.

[stitch626]

As did mine.

[Chris Propst]

Well, he's French but culturally British and we know that he has Spanish ancestry.
This is really nothing unusual; it's not like different nationalities don't have huge overlap with the ancestries of others. Just read about the genetic ancestry tests. Plus, it's the 24th century, people are probably multicultural.
We already have plenty of people that consider themselves bi-cultural, especially when you consider Western Europe.

[Sionnach Glic]

Indeed, but it's still rather bizzare to hear someone with a strong British accent being called French. Why not just call him English?

[Captain Seafort]

Because then you'd loose the comedy inherent in a Frenchman singing Hearts of Oak and bragging about Trafalgar.

[Sionnach Glic]

[Mikey]

touche.

[Mark]

Oddly enough, for a Frenchman, Picard never surrendered the big E. Rather unrealistic if you ask me

[kostmayer]

Um, didn't he surrender to Q in the first episode? Right after they seperate the saucer section.

[Mark]

Aww crap. I forgot about that that. Yep, he's french.

[Lazar]

Indeed, but it's still rather bizzare to hear someone with a strong British accent being called French. Why not just call him English?

I know, I was never able to figure that out. TOS made more of an effort to depict Terran characters with realistic accents from their native countries, but I guess they just gave up on that. And didn't Picard's family have French accents, further complicating things?

More generally, a problem that I have with Star Trek - and with a lot of science fiction - is that they're depicting a universe in which humanity is united, but the human characters are overwhelmingly American, or to a lesser extent European. I see this all the time in American science fiction, and I'm like, when did 80-90% of the world's population suddenly become American? Realistically, huge portions of the crew should be East Asian, South Asian, African, etc, with Americans only being a modest minority. Bernd Schneider wrote a thing about this.

[Teaos]

As I have said with Globalisation in the future we may not have accents anymore.

[Sionnach Glic]

I always find it surprising that there's no difference in accents between someone from Earth, and someone from a far flung colony. Over a couple of centuries some difference should start cropping up.