Dialects in the movies

[Wilson Gray]

On Feb 22, 2005, at 11:50 AM, Barbara Need wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Barbara Need <nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU>
> 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.

Needless to say, I'm only too familiar with that reaction. Your cousin
has my complete and utter sympathy, On the other hand, I must admit
that people speaking a not-from-around-here dialect do be sounding
right funny, if they can be understood at all. You just have to be
careful. A friend of mine once asked a group of Jamaicans what language
they were speaking and was caught completely off-guard by the answer:
"English." She was expecting to hear them answer "Yoruba" or "Twi" or
some such.

-Wilson Gray

>
> 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
>