Frownin’ Hank Morgan wears a bit of a toothless smile these days underneath his greasy, thick beard. Morgan, a life-long pirate, pillager, and overall chaos-causer, has made over 500 friends on Facebook since April, thanks to the Facebook pirate talk option. Even for this interview, Morgan had to speak through his translator, Ms. Penelope Muffet, to ensure more effective communication.

Morgan growled a long, low tone, licked his lips and burped. Ms. Muffet quickly translated his message, “Mr. Morgan is very excited about this new application on Facebook. He is constantly meeting and interacting with people all over the seven seas, but he feels a little disconnected. It can be disheartening to aways be making and losing friends.” Morgan has recently put his engagement to his long-time girlfriend online for the world to see. His new profile proudly states he is ‘Betrothed to the swashbuckler Smilin’ Azriel Smithe’. He screamed loudly and stabbed a knife into the wooden table he was sitting at. Ms. Muffet added, “He feels like he’s finally part of a community.”

Facebook, the online social networking site, has opened its doors to many people over the years, with hundreds of language options available at the push of a button. After huge demand from the pirate community, wanting a place online to call their own, they added the option of English (Pirate), in which the entire site translates to pirate code. Within weeks of its implementation, hundreds of pirates were pillaging a new spot…the world wide web.

Speaking again on Morgan’s behalf, Ms. Muffet assures us that pirates are highly intelligent, highly trained people who want to be a part of the online revolution. Their very distinct language and sentence structure makes it hard to learn new languages. With limited language skills, it can be hard to join the mainstream culture. Facebook has changed all that for Morgan and many of his peers. Morgan punched one man and spit in another’s soup. Ms. Muffet added, “They are, in their own way, extremely grateful.”