linguistic movie moments

[Claire Cowie]

And then there's the scene from Wayne's World I where Wayne is having a
conversation about relationships with pop-star love-interest Cassandra. She
is a native Cantonese speaker and Wayne has (rapidly) mastered Cantonese. In
the scene,  their deeply serious and reflective conversation is about the
psychology of relationships and dependence, but the very lengthy English
subtitles are co-ordinated with maybe only one or two words in Cantonese.
It's a great take on linguistic relativity.

Dr. Claire Cowie
Dept of English Language and Linguistics
University of Sheffield
Western Bank
Sheffield S10 2TN
United Kingdom

Tel. +44 (0)114 2220217
Fax. +44 (0)114 2768251