# Language/dialect/accent inconsistencies in movies that really bug you **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 20, 2012, 9:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619 "2012-12-20T09:35:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Rollo\_Tomasi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/58956e/32.png) [@Rollo\_Tomasi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rollo_Tomasi)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2012, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/21 "2012-12-20T18:11:23Z")
> [@Agent\_Foxtrot](#): > > A hundred years from now, movie viewers will laugh at the idea of Kenneth Branagh playing a Nazi officer. It’s been eighty-eight years since Lew Ayres played a German soldier in **All Quiet on the Western Front** , and that movie is considered a classic. Casting actors to play characters of a different nationality has been done since the very beginning of the movies themselves, and there’s no reason to think that it will die out any time soon, even in an increasingly globalized industry. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2012, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/22 "2012-12-20T20:07:09Z")
> [@silenus](#): > > My mind may be playing tricks on me, but I seem to recall the very first release of Star Wars in theaters _didn’t_ subtitle Greedo’s talk with Han. Then in later video releases they did. Am I imagining the whole thing? It worked better not knowing specifically what the bounty hunter was saying. I saw _Star Wars_ several times in its original release, and IIRC Greedo’s dialogue was always subtitled. ---
**Author:** ![TheChileanBlob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thechileanblob/32/435_2.png) [@TheChileanBlob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheChileanBlob)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2012, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/23 "2012-12-20T20:34:58Z")
I don’t remember Greedo being subtitled, and was surprised by it when I saw the new, improved version. I think he just goes Ooba Deeba Gleeba Solo? and Han answers in English. ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2012, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/24 "2012-12-20T21:20:19Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > I’ll cut Star Wars some slack here, as the implication seems to be that the aliens _can’t_ speak the human language (Common? Basic? I forget), and vice versa. Different species lack the vocal hardware capable of producing others’ sounds. I mean, could you see Han speaking Wookie? **District 9** did the seem thing. Humans & Prawns are anatomically incapble of speaking eachother’s languages. > [@Agent\_Foxtrot](#): > > I’ve always found it silly that Hollywood uses any one of the United Kingdom English accents as the default European accent, regardless of the character’s natural language. At least _Star Trek: TNG_ lampshaded this as Captain Picard received his education in England, despite being a Frenchman… Supposedly they did originally plan for Picard to speak with a French accent, but while shooting the pilot the result was too comically to be taken seriously. I’ve heard the DVDs have some clips of that as a bonus feature. It did seem really weird in that episode when he visited his family in France on vacation (after deassimilating from the Bor) since they all had British accents (including IIRC the local mayor), then again I assume the characters were really speaking French, not English. The language situtation on **Stargate: SG1** always bugged me. Every single planet they visit has everyone speaking English, usually with North American accents, despite the local humans being harvested from Earth millenia ago. ---
**Author:** ![Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slow_moving_vehicle/32/291_2.png) [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slow_Moving_Vehicle)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2012, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/25 "2012-12-20T23:20:41Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > To be fair, a modern-day English accent is no closer to a 12th-Century English accent than a modern-day American accent is. True, but Costner’s flat American vowels were very jarring and out-of-context; I think it actually detracted from the characterization. I especially remember wincing at him saying “Thanks” to Morgan Freeman. Horrible. > [@Agent\_Foxtrot](#): > > I’ve always found it silly that Hollywood uses any one of the United Kingdom English accents as the default European accent, regardless of the character’s natural language. Because British English is the most familiar (to Americans) European dialect of English. Or, I should specify, Estuary English and RP, which are the two dialects most often heard in American movies. RP also connotes sophistication to us, so it is the dialect of aristocrats, ancient Romans, European academics and villains (but not thugs). One of the cleverest treatments of language I ever saw was in \*The Thirteenth Warrior. \*Antonio Banderas plays a medieval Arab merchant who travels (for some reason I’ve forgotten) with a group of Norse warriors back to their homeland. During the trip, he’s shown sitting around the fire with the warriors, who are speaking in their native language (I _think_ the actors are speaking Norwegian during these scenes). Gradually, the actors begin to sprinkle their Norwegian with English words, then sentences, until they are saying all their lines in English. It’s how the film depicts Banderas’ character picking up their language. Very clever, I thought. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2012, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/26 "2012-12-20T23:36:40Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > i)No. Why? > > ii)Yes, but I think you might be misunderstanding me. > > I’ve seen multilingual conversations in progress, a lot - and in fact, I’m comparing movies against my experience of having witnessed conversations between multilingual Asians. > > In real life, these conversations switched back and forth freely - often mid-sentence, between the two languages. > > In movies (at least the type I’m complaining about) you have one character talking one language, subtitled, and the other character speaking English - and although both clearly and fully understand each others’ language, they only ever speak in their own. > > I mean, maybe this happens a lot in the real world, but I’ve witnessed a lot of different cross-cultural conversations and never, ever seen one like it appears in the movies. This is exactly what happens in real life when my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law are talking to each other. Mother-in-law speaks Chinese, sister-in-law responds in English. It looks weird, but it works for them. ---
**Author:** ![Mr\_Downtown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Mr\_Downtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Downtown)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2012, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/27 "2012-12-21T04:50:47Z")
I’ve never become truly fluent in any foreign language, but my experience is the opposite: I usually speak halting German (or Spanish or French) to someone who responds in halting English. I’ve always thought it easier to _speak_ a few words of a foreign language than to _understand_ it when spoken to me. This way, the conversation automatically drops to the level of mutual understanding. ---
**Author:** ![Isamu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/7c8e57/32.png) [@Isamu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isamu)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2012, 6:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/28 "2012-12-21T06:11:24Z")
> [@Mr\_Downtown](#): > > I’ve never become truly fluent in any foreign language, but my experience is the opposite: I usually speak halting German (or Spanish or French) to someone who responds in halting English. I’ve always thought it easier to _speak_ a few words of a foreign language than to _understand_ it when spoken to me. This way, the conversation automatically drops to the level of mutual understanding. That’s true at the very beginners stage of learning. But later when you start to become close to fluent and someone else is close to fluent in your language, it’s easier just to speak your own native languages, because you know the other party will get it. As an analogy.: A mediocre math student can read a great theorem and understand it, but he can’t write the same kind of theorem - he’d make too many mistakes. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2012, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/29 "2012-12-21T21:33:54Z")
In _2010: Odyssey Two_, Arthur C. Clarke wrote that the Soviet members of a joint Soviet-U.S. space mission would make it a point to always speak in English, and the U.S. members would always speak in Russian, so that each would have the chance to improve their grasp of the others’ language. > [@alphaboi867](#): > > …Supposedly they did originally plan for Picard to speak with a French accent… when he visited his family in France on vacation (after deassimilating from the Bor) since they all had British accents (including IIRC the local mayor), then again I assume the characters were really speaking French, not English… A Doper here some years ago suggested that there was a second Hundred Years’s War or the like, and that all French people spoke with British accents by Picard’s time. Not a bad fanwank. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2012, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/30 "2012-12-21T22:51:44Z")
It is possible to speak a second language so well that one has “no accent”. (That is, speaking with the accent of a native speaker of the second language rather than the accent of the first language.) Since the UK is a lot closer to Continental Europe than the US or Canada, a Frenchman would be more likely to have had a British English teacher than a North American one and could more easily visit the UK than North America. I would expect that a Frenchman who spoke English like a native would be a lot more likely to have learned British “BBC English” than North American “newscaster English”. ---
**Author:** ![Ephemera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8baadc/32.png) [@Ephemera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ephemera)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2012, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/31 "2012-12-21T23:05:46Z")
> [@Agent\_Foxtrot](#): > > I’ve always found it silly that Hollywood uses any one of the United Kingdom English accents as the default European accent, regardless of the character’s natural language. At least _Star Trek: TNG_ lampshaded this as Captain Picard received his education in England, despite being a Frenchman. I just checked Memory Alpha just to make sure I wasn’t misremembering, but Picard’s accent is never addressed at any point in the series or the movies, nor is his interest in Shakespeare or his proclivity for Earl Grey tea. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2012, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619/32 "2012-12-21T23:31:59Z")
> [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](#): > > A Doper here some years ago suggested that there was a second Hundred Years’s War or the like, and that all French people spoke with British accents by Picard’s time. Not a bad fanwank. My theory is that Picard \*doesn’t \*speak English; we only \*hear \*him speaking English because of the Universal Translator. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/language-dialect-accent-inconsistencies-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/644619.md?page=1)