Dialects in film

[Peter A. McGraw]

This is straying a bit from the original thread, but in the current
Masterpiece Theatre series on PBS, "Island at War," the actor playing the
commander of the German military forces that have occupied a fictional
British Channel Island during World War II takes an interesting approach to
the foreign accent issue.  He manages speech that sounds generically
foreign, avoiding the stereotypical Nazi bully accent.  It's clearly
foreign, and in your "willing suspension of disbelief" mode you can accept
that it MIGHT be German--that is, until he mangles a couple of actual
German words.  He tells the local officials that "this island is now under
the control of the deutsch Wehrmacht" (instead of the deutsche Wehrmacht),
and he consistently calls his assistant, whose name is apparently supposed
to be Müller, something that sounds more like "moolah."  If he had only
consulted an actual speaker of German to get the few actual German words
right, his approach would be very credible.

Peter Mc.

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Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ************************