Multilingualism in the Movies

Hollywood Characters and Their Language Choices
Erscheinungsjahr 2009
ISBN: 978-3-7720-8270-2
Verlag: Gunter Narr Verlag

Buch, Englisch, 236 Seiten, HC runder Rücken kaschiert, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 538 g

Reihe: Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten

Do 'bad guys' in Hollywood movies necessarily speak 'broken' English? What happens when film characters switch between English, French, or even Serbian? Why does Hollywood show Mozart and his wife speaking American English? This sociolinguistic survey is based on a corpus of multilingual movie dialogues from 32 contemporary mainstream Hollywood movies. It begins with an analysis of movies where the English Language is illogically spoken by characters who, in real life, would have used a different Language. A second major focus is on the fictional characters: how are individual multilingualism and factors such as sex, social status, and being a 'good' or a 'bad guy' interrelated? Finally, the study discusses the amount of dialogue in other Languages, how it is rendered comprehensible, and the naswitching. The results indicate that the common view of Hollywood movies contributing to ethnic stereotyping and ideologies of English-only monolingualism falls short of fictional reality.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bleichenbacher, Lukas

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmtheorie, Filmanalyse
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Sprachsoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Einzelne Sprachen & Sprachfamilien
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Soziolinguistik