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Hollywood and English as a second language |
| Ok, this has bothered me for some time now, especially as a native English-speaking linguist living in a non-native English-speaking country.I love the show My Name is Earl.It's great and brings me back to a simpler life of living somewhere in rural America!Yesterday was the episode (a rerun) where there was a French exchange student that Earl had to make amends to.My problem is that, though his very stereotypical French-laced accent, his English grammar was impeccableso much that it made me realise that screenwriters, who are all probably native speakers, are writing the lines for a native French speaker as if he (or she) was a native English speaker.Zee accnt just isn't enuuf.It just grates on my nerves and it's completely not believable when, for example, Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), a German, from the X-Men speaks to Storm (Halle Barry) with idioms only a native speaker would be able to unconsciously construct this is without any flaws in, for example, prepositional usage in phrasal verbs.On Smallville, Mikail Mxyzptlk (Trent Ford) came as a Slavic exchange student and was speaking about bets and "rigging" games like he was a regular member of the mafia in the States!I don't think that his powers, or Nightcrawler's for that matter, is the ability to use American English idioms with the greatest of ease.I think that Hollywood and television writers need to do research, like getting a native speaker to say what they want in English and transcribing it, so that the validity of the character's background sticks.For a non-native (American) English speaker to say some thing like "I gotta hightail it outta here" in a regular conversation is very unlikely.And imagine it in an Italian or German accent it's ridiculous.And you can't just always stick in the "how do you say"!The actor may speak with a believable accent (not always though!), but it's up to the writers to make the legitimacy of the character truly believable. |
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