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ERIC Number: EJ979143
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-May
Pages: 22
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0167-8507
EISSN: N/A
Linguicism in Hollywood Movies? Representations of, and Audience Reactions to Multilingualism in Mainstream Movie Dialogues
Bleichenbacher, Lukas
Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, v31 n2 p155-176 May 2012
Hollywood movies have been a prime site for the representation of intercultural and multilingual encounters for decades. As such, they are not only of interest to everyday cinemagoers or home viewers, but have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines, including socio-linguistics. A main focus of much previous work, such as Shohat & Stam (1994), Lippi-Green (1997) and Berg (2002), has been on issues of misrepresentation and negative stereotyping of characters constructed as the "Other", such as speakers of non-standard Englishes, or indeed languages other than English. This has raised the question of the extent to which the English-language cinematic mainstream embodies the fictional counterpart of real-life linguistic discrimination, or linguicism. In this article, I present and exemplify three different quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of mono- versus multilingualism in movie dialogues. These include an account of language choice patterns in a corpus of multilingual Hollywood movies, an analysis of metalinguistic content proffered by movie characters in the dialogues, and the reactions of movie viewers to these phenomena in an online message board. While the insights gained from the first two approaches do point towards patterns of linguicism, this is not generally the case for the audience reactions, which tend to be more favourable towards a rich and balanced depiction of multilingual phenomena in movie dialogues. (Contains 2 tables.)
De Gruyter Mouton. Available from: Walter de Gruyter. P.O. Box 960, Herndon, VA 20172-0960. Tel: 800-208-8144; Tel: 703-661-1589; Fax: 703-661-1501; e-mail: degruytermail@presswarehouse.com; Web site: http://www.degruyter.com/browse?type_0=journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A