Multilingualism in the Movies: Hollywood Characters and Their Language ChoicesDo 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 study is based on a corpus of multilingual movie dialogues from 32 contemporary Hollywood thrillers, dramas and comedies. With an approach that draws on stylistics, critical discourse analysis and quantitative sociolinguistics, the author tests the claim that the movies reinforce stereotypes of foreigners and contribute to ideologies of English-only monolingualism. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Multilingualism in the real world | 7 |
Multilingualism in fiction | 21 |
The Language Contact Movie Corpus | 39 |
Replacement strategies | 55 |
Characterization | 93 |
Crosstextual differences | 121 |
Who uses interlanguage? 6 5 Summary and conclusion 135 | 135 |
Language choice | 147 |
Conclusions | 219 |
| 234 | |
Common terms and phrases
Action thriller Amadeus American appear audience Bourne Identity Braveheart Brontė categories of language chapter characterization clearly code-switching comedy communicative situation contact movies contrast conversation corpus Danko depicted different languages discussed Elizabeth endolingual Enemy Lines English L1 evocation example Excerpt exolingual fictional fluent Fools Rush fractal recursivity Frantic French Kiss German Green Card individual multilingualism instance interaction interlanguage interlocutors Isabel Italian Jack Ryan Jackal Jason Bourne Kate Kodoroff L1 speakers L2 users language choice language contact Licence to Kill linguicism linguicist linguistic repertoire mixed scenes monolingual motivations movie characters movie scenes movies analyzed multilingual multilingual discourse Murron narrative importance negative characters Nemerov non-English OL only scenes OL turns OL1 characters patterns Peacemaker Pianist Polish pragmatic protagonist Red Heat replacement representation Russian Sabrina Saving Private Ryan Schindler's List second language settings social sociolinguistic Spanish speak English stereotyping strategy subtitles switch Table texts tion Tomorrow Never Dies typically utterances viewer Walker