Dialects in the movies

[Jonathan Lighter]

Much of what we've been saying here is insidiously subjective.  For example, I think Leo Gorcey sounded genuine, though his (apparently) natural accent was pretty uncommon by the 1960s - I believe.  Other New Yorkers claim that Gorcey sounded fake.  Huntz Hall is harder to comment on because, though he too came from a working-class background, his screen character required a more exaggerated delivery.  Phonologically, I think he was OK.

Have mentioned in another thread that my grandfather's accent was very similar to Archie Bunker's. Much younger New Yorkers, though, may feel that Archie was overdone.

The "worst" put-on accents may include those where the underlying "outsider" accent still comes through..

But you gotta be a dialectologist. And even then...

JL

Barbara Need <nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Barbara Need
Subject: Re: Dialects in the movies
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>Matt Damon's and Ben Affleck's Boston accent in Good Will Hunting is
>authentic. I think they are both from Boston -- I see Ben Affleck on
>TV coverage of many Red Sox games. Robin Williams' accent is not
>great in that film. I think his character was supposed to be from
>South Boston.
>
>Tivoli

A cousin of mine from the Boston area reported hearing Damon and
Affleck speaking Southie on SNL--and it took her a little while to
realize why this should be funny.

I am going to move this ever so slightly over to dialect on TV. There
was a short-run TV series called Cupid. I watched one episode--it was
filmed on the University of Chicago campus and the male love interest
of the week was a linguistics professor! (Of course, the show put
things where they ain't--a faculty dining room (no such beast) in the
Divinity School common room.) The female love interest of the week
was a waitress at the faculty dining room who sat in on one of his
lectures (for those of you who know the campus--in the large lecture
hall on the first floor of the Social Sciences building, rarely used
by linguists) and they ended up in a Higgins-Doolittle relationship.
Mind you, he never used the Language Labs! (of which I happen to be
the site manager). At some point, she accused him of trying to
reshape her speech in his image (which was bizarre, because I think
she first approached him about eradicating her Spanish accent) and he
went into a spiel about how his low class (Southie) accent had drawn
a lot of ridicule when he went to Harvard and about how he had
improved his accent to improve his social standing (or something like
that). He did most of that speech in "Southie". Well, I am not a
speaker of this dialect, but I lived north of Boston for all my
secondary years and it was awful!

Barbara Need
UChicago--Linguistics


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