From 'Parasite' to 'Emilia Pérez': How movies shape language, with Andrew Cheng
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm here with Andrew Chung, and we are going to talk about the language in movies because the Oscars are coming up, and Dr. Chung is one of the perfect person to talk about this because he wrote an article recently that caught my eye about language in movies. Dr. Chung teaches linguistics at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, and his research focuses on the sounds of language.

the social perceptions of language, and all sorts of phenomena just associated with bilingualism and multilingualism. Dr. Andrew Chung, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, you bet. So you wrote this article about linguistic realism in Hollywood, and it was just fascinating. Can you tell the audience what you mean by linguistic realism? Sure. I'll start by saying that, as you mentioned, I'm a linguist. I'm not a film critic. I'm not like a

movie analyst of any sort. I'm just a real big fan of cinema. But as a linguist, specifically a sociolinguist, one of the things I'm interested in is the attitudes that people hold toward language use in real life and also in media. So when I was watching movies over the past...

10 or 15 years I've noticed this trend toward the use of authentic language in films themselves. So that's what I'm calling linguistic realism is when language use in a movie really reflects what you might hear in a real life situation. And this is especially for dramatic movies that are based off of real life. I'm not talking about fantasy movies where you've got all sorts of alien languages that are made up. That's also very, very cool.

But, you know, ever since Parasite, that Korean movie, won Best Picture in 2020, I think we've seen this huge surge in movies that are popular, award-winning, that use non-English languages. I think people may not be that aware, but like for the hundred or so years that the Academy Award has been giving out these awards, a lot of the movies have been in English, regardless of where they take place.

Right. You've got this movie that may take place in France or Italy or wherever. It's just everything's in English all the time, which is not obviously not very realistic because in France they speak French. In Italy, they speak Italian, etc. But I think there's been a noticeable increase in the use of non-English language and subtitles for those movies.

in an industry that's historically averse to having non-English just there. Right. So the director... Parasite was the first non-English movie to win Best Picture, right, in the Academy Awards. I have this really fun fact, which is since the first Academy Awards in 1929, there have been 20 non-English language films that were even nominated, not just one, just 20 films that have been nominated for Best Picture.

10 of those films, 10 of those nominations have occurred in the past seven years. Oh, wow. So from 1929 to like 2010 or 2015, only 10 movies not in English were nominated for Best Picture. But then suddenly we have what I can see a huge surge in non-English language films, just getting a lot of attention. And these can be American films that have non-English in them. So I'm thinking of like

Past Lives, which was filmed mostly in Korean. I'm not sure what else. Zone of Interest, I think. I think that's like a UK-American production, but there's a lot of German in that one, obvious reasons.

So, this is not just international films that are obviously not going to be in English that are making inroads for American audiences, but American-made films that tell American stories but have a realistic portrayal of non-English languages in them because English might be the lingua franca of the United States, but it's a very, very diverse, linguistically diverse country. Right. Now, do all these films have subtitles? No.

Many of them do. Most of them do. And some of them sort of strategically choose not to use them in certain places. Yeah. I'm thinking last year, Killers of the Flower Moon won so many awards.

It didn't get Best Picture, lost that to Oppenheimer, but actually in both of those movies. So Killers of the Flower Moon has a lot of really great dialogue that's written in Osage. That's the indigenous language of the Osage tribe. So there are scenes, of course, where the characters are using Osage and it is subtitled, but there are other scenes where it may, you know, the characters will be speaking in it, but it's not subtitled. If the audience, you know, doesn't speak Osage and doesn't know it,

They're sort of left out, but that does not necessarily detract from your understanding of the scene because for certain audiences, like it makes sense. They're just saying something that's going to be private. We don't have to know what they're saying, right?

but we can sort of understand from the rest of the acting or the context of the scene what is really being conveyed. Does that make sense? Yeah. Does it almost go back to, I mean, it makes me think of silent films where they weren't saying anything and yet they told a whole story. Yes. I, you know, it was the director of Parasite who said, you know, in his acceptance speech in 2020, like once audiences can get over the one inch barrier of subtitles, then there's a whole world of cinema that can be opened up to them.

And while I fully agree, I think it's also interesting to think about how the beginning of cinema, before we had talkies, when they were just movies, right, just moving pictures, there was no dialogue at all. And all of the, you know, dialogue or important parts of the scene had to be read. So we're just sort of coming back to that. I think there is a very interesting...

aversion that moviegoers have had to seeing like, like, I don't want to read my movie. I want to watch it. But reading has been a very fundamental part of cinema for a very, very long time. Yeah. It makes me think of the famous opening to Star Wars. You have to read the beginning of Star Wars. That is a classic. Yes. And I love that. Yeah, that's great. And

You know, you talked about, you know, the modern trend toward realism. And that made me think of older movies, like in the 40s and 50s. And I feel like there was a Hollywood accent that wasn't the way people really talked, but that you would see in movies. And I'm not like a huge fan of old movies. But when you watch an old movie, I feel like the people are speaking differently. Is that something that you know about? Yeah.

Yeah, that's so true. So I think one actress in particular who really does this well is Katharine Hepburn. She's in movies like Philadelphia Story, I think, which is one I watched recently and I really loved. The accent that those actors and actresses were trained in is something that's called the transatlantic accent. And that transatlantic refers to it sort of being somewhere in between East Coast United States and North

the UK and the British accents that are on the other side of the Atlantic ocean. And this is a very part, even though all these movies are being filmed in LA, like none of them sounded like they're actually from California. They had this, um, you know, this trained accent that was supposed to sound a little bit posh, uh, a little bit more high class sounded foreign in a certain way, but it definitely wasn't British still familiar, uh, for American audiences. Um, I don't have, you know, uh,

that much information about why this became popular, but like many accents come and go, there's so many trends in what people decide is cool or interesting and people may subconsciously or consciously adopt different accents as the trends come in and out.

So this is just one that dominated Hollywood in the 40s and 50s. Yeah. So there's been a trend toward more and more realism. So when you talk about realism, are you just talking about sort of representing languages that aren't standard English? Or are you talking about other forms of speaking too? I think that I would include authentic use of non-English languages, but also authentic use of different accents of English. So it's...

we can start talking about movies from this year. Yeah. Uh, because I've, uh, I'm really excited about the upcoming Oscars and, and,

One example that I would give is from the movie Conclave, and that is one of the nominees for Best Picture. Also, I think Ralph Fiennes is up for Best Actor for that one. So this movie takes place in Vatican City, a bunch of cardinals who are trying to elect a new pope. So unsurprisingly, there's lots of Latin and lots of Italian being spoken, and many, many scenes where it's just Italian. So there's subtitles for those who don't know Italian to be able to follow what's going on.

And even these actors who are not Italian speakers trained and practiced enough Italian so that they could come across as believably Italian.

a cardinal who may be American, but because his job is a cardinal, he understands his language. It would have been so easy to have a movie that was just completely in English, still had the same plot, but it's much more authentic and more believable to imagine that all these cardinals would be speaking multiple languages because that's what happens in real life. So that's one excellent example that I could cite right away. Yeah. I want to see that movie. I've heard it's really good. It is fantastic. Yeah.

So good. So what about some other ones? You talked about everything everywhere all at once too. Yeah.

Oh, I really loved Everything Everywhere All at Once for multiple reasons. Its linguistic realism is really fantastic. It's got the main family of the main characters are a family that mixes Mandarin and Cantonese and English, which is, you know, as someone who is Asian-American coming from a family that uses multiple Asian languages in the home as well. I thought like that is such a such an accurate representation of what our dinner conversations can be like just mixing all these languages.

Um, everything everywhere all at once also has a really fantastic scene, uh, somewhere in the middle where they use subtitles quite creatively. So for these, for these scenes that are in Cantonese and Mandarin, yeah, there are subtitles being used. Audiences have to read. It's totally fine. But like what the directors, the Daniels did with everything everywhere all at once was also use, uh, subtitles creatively in a scene where there's no dialogue at all. And I'm not going to, I'm not going to spoil it. If you haven't seen it, you really, really should, but

I think arguably one of the most powerful scenes in that movie was completely silent.

And yet it had subtitles. Oh. To explain what the characters were thinking and saying to each other when they weren't, when the characters weren't actually speaking. It was, it was sharp. It was clever. It was part of the hallmarks of, you know, obviously a very deserving Best Picture winner. Amazing. Yeah. I haven't seen that one either. That sounds really cool. I'm not sure if this is related, but one thing I remember reading about last year is about the use of subtitles on TV. Like I think during the, during the sort of peak of the pandemic, people were,

people were watching with subtitles more and people were being delighted by the creative use of subtitles. I'm trying to remember, I think maybe in Stranger Things.

There were some things about like the describing the monsters and things like that, that were especially creative. You know, let's say like this, I'm not getting it right, but like heavy breathing, but that wasn't it. It was like, you know, tense moment, but that wasn't it either. But do you know what I'm talking about? Well, I can agree that like this trend towards using subtitles creatively or just, you know, audiences being accepting of subtitles in general is not limited to movies. So we do have that in TV and we have really like fantastic TV shows that

um, that are not in English. Shogun is one that comes to mind. So that is mostly in Japanese. And so there's obviously subtitles there and at home TV viewers don't seem to mind anymore. Like people are watching a lot of TV and movies at home and sometimes they're maybe distracted while they're watching it. Maybe they're cooking or, you know, playing Wordle or something while they're watching TV. And so like having the subtitles there also helps people pay more attention. And I, you know, I don't judge that. I just think it's

Nice to have that accessibility option and for people to be more accepting of it overall. That's great. You know, I'm wondering, what about fantasy movies where maybe there's even a made up language? You know, what are the do they go for realism with that, too? Are there interesting things going on with that beyond sort of just language construction? Yeah.

Yes, I think, you know, so Dune Part 2 is nominated for Best Picture and there's a language, a conlang, as we call it, constructed language used in that film. So it's a language that doesn't exist. And yet when we hear it as audience members, it sounds so real. And the reason I like that is because people who are involved in fantasy take so much care to get the

I mean, something that you could call linguistic realism, even though a little bit of a paradox because the language is not real. But the realistic part of it comes from the fact that the actors trained so hard to make that language sound authentic and for people to sound like each other. So this applies to Dune. This applies to Avatar. This applies to lots of fantasy and sci-fi movies like Lord of the Rings had Elvish, of course. Game of Thrones has Dothraki. Mm-hmm.

The really wonderful thing about filmmaking is how you can see that people... It's how evident it is when people care about making things seem authentic. And so you'll have people training with linguists and accent coaches to make their fake, completely made-up language sound realistic.

And I just, I'm really, you know, the fact that in fantasy and sci-fi movies, people have been really open to this and obviously open to seeing subtitles for alien languages or fantasy languages for a long time. The fact that that can be transferred now onto dramas and other genre movies where we maybe didn't expect there to be non-English languages. I just love that fantasy movies sort of paved the way for that. Yeah. Yeah.

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And sometimes they use indigenous languages too, don't they? Yeah, for Black Panther, that was a great one that I noticed. In Black Panther 2, they sort of created a,

new version of Marvel's Atlantis, where instead of being this sunken Greek kingdom, they decided to build off of Mayan language and Mayan culture, which is not extinct and it's not submerged. It still exists today. They decided to use the modern day language of Mayan to represent what the lost city of Atlantis used to speak. So I guess I would say that

I am of two minds of the use of Mayan and Black Panther. I think it's fantastic that the filmmakers wanted to expose new audiences to a language that they may not be familiar with. And at the same time, I think it's quite interesting to notice that Mayan was used

For the people of Atlantis, and particularly their leader, Namor, who was the arch-villain of the whole movie, and whenever you hear Mayan being spoken in Black Panther 2, it's by these evil, scary henchmen and the villain of the movie, and that's the only circumstance in which you hear the language, versus when they're using Rosa for the Wakandan language. It's just...

you know, relegated to bits and pieces like greetings and very, very small bits of dialogue. Mostly the heroes are speaking in English.

And the villains are speaking in Mayan. Yeah. I mean, as I was preparing for the interview, I was doing some reading and I found this study from 1998 that looked at children's cartoons. And they looked at 70-some cartoons and not a single villain spoke standard American English. You know, these are like American cartoons. Every single villain had some sort of accent. Like, what is going on with that? That's...

That's, you know, that is actually a direct legacy of different stereotypes that Hollywood used to have. So there's all sorts of there's all sorts of stereotypes and tropes that have existed in drama, you know, in theater for so long. And in early Hollywood, they had the same like, OK, well, villains are always foreign. It's a bit of.

I mean, we can just call it what it is, xenophobia that was inherited from certain time periods in American culture and American history. But those tropes became popular for a reason. It's really easy, I guess, to have villains portrayed as people who are different. And often those are like...

the British accent because that's as far away as you can get from American English while still being like a very, very understandable. As a result, like Disney villains in particular also have, like we think about Scar and we can think about Jafar and we can think about Gru. Yeah. Minions. Yep. A lot of villains will have

have foreign accents or just different accents from American English. Of course, the heroes, the ones who are supposed to represent, you know, the best of America will be speaking with their American accent.

That is pretty common, unfortunately. But real villains come in all shapes and sizes and accents and languages. I hope that with this trend toward linguistic realism, we'll see our villains can speak any language or any variety, even our own. Absolutely. So what about, so I think you had some thoughts about some of the other movies that are nominated this year. Oh yeah, for sure. So I talked about Conclave. Another one is Onora. I don't know if you've seen that one. Mm-hmm.

Oh, it's fantastic. So Anora takes place in New York, in Brooklyn, and it centers on a sex worker named Anora who is Russian-American. And so she's working class Brooklyn. She speaks with a very heavy Brooklyn accent, but she also speaks in Russian.

And the plot sort of gets going when she meets a very rich Russian scion of some kind and they get into all sorts of hijinks. But I thought a really lovely scene in that movie was when Anora, the character, explains like, you know, I can speak Russian, but I don't really use it that much. I just use it to speak with my grandmother. And so I have really basic Russian. It's enough for her to like have conversations, but she's nowhere near fluent.

I found that to be a really lovely encapsulation of what we call in the field heritage language use. So, Anora, the character, is someone who maybe grew up hearing Russian a lot, but has never lived in Russia. So, you know, basically grew up in the States, speaks English, but knows what Russian she has based on her family experience. And that is so true for so many generations of second-generation immigrants in the U.S.

Now, Mikey Madison, the actress who plays her is not Russian American as far as I'm aware. And it's also not from Brooklyn, but you can tell just from like, she's a phenomenal actress. She's nominated for best actress, I believe. And you can tell from her performance that she trained really, really hard to get that accent. Right. It's like really thick. It's like a really, some people might say it's like overdone, but I think it's great. Um, I think it's really well done and I love it.

I love how evident it is. She took care to really get those sounds correct. What is the experience of heritage speakers? Are they more likely to speak the language than read and write it? Or do they typically read and write too? What is typical? There's a whole range of experiences that heritage language speakers have. And it depends on what language we're talking about, the history of that community within the United States, as well as its relationship to other languages that are already here.

But I'd say that if I were to just do one blanket generalization, we have a lot of cases of passive bilingualism among heritage speakers. And so that means that they're much better at understanding when they hear a language than speaking it themselves. And

Since most heritage speakers grew up in the English-only American educational system, they don't really get much of an opportunity to learn how to read or write in those languages either. So that's something that you'll often find is ability to listen and hear and understand.

more limited ability to speak. And then it's rare to have people also able to read and write. That's so interesting because it's so different from learning a second language, like in school or online. You know, I feel like I'm much more comfortable writing and reading than I am speaking or listening in the language I'm very not doing very well at trying to learn. Yeah.

What language is that? Spanish. I've been doing online stuff for years, but not 10 minutes a day. Right.

Right. And this is actually really important, a really important issue for schools that want to teach heritage languages. Like if you're going to if you're a college and you're offering Spanish classes, then the intro Spanish for beginners who don't know who are not heritage speakers who have no background in it has to be very different from the intro to Spanish for heritage speakers who may be like very, very good at speaking already, but just, you know, need help writing or like learning different types of vocabulary outside of what they know at home.

Yeah. Well, I totally sidetracked us. But did you have other more movies that have interesting things going on with the Oscars this year? I was going to say, speaking of Spanish and heritage Spanish, I have to talk about Emilia Perez. Have you heard of that movie? No. Emilia Perez nominated for so many awards, 13 nominations, which is a record. Wow. It's nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress. It already won a bunch of awards in other things like the Golden Globes.

Emilio Perez is mired in so much controversy for various reasons. But one of them is, okay, maybe this is not so much a controversy, but this is a very strong critique I've heard from many of my friends who are Mexican Spanish speakers. Now, Emilio Perez is a French film, but it's set in Mexico with characters who are mostly Mexican speakers.

Yeah.

One, when the lead actress is speaking Spanish, it sounds very Spain Spanish and not Mexican, even though she's supposed to be a Mexican character.

And then when it comes to Selena Gomez's character, they were very, very critical of her pronunciation because it sounded so off. In fact, you know, one of my friends said it was so hard to understand what she was saying, not just because of her pronunciation, but because of like whoever wrote the dialogue seems to not understand what is Mexican Spanish and what is Spain Spanish and sometimes mixed in slang from both varieties or both dialects into one line.

resulting in something completely absurd that no one in real life would actually say. And so here we have this very interesting pushback against linguistic realism because, okay, we've got this French film

If we weren't going to be realistic at all, the French director and the French producers could have just been, let's hire French actors and just do the whole film in French. Why not? But they wanted to go for realism. So they hired Spanish speaking actors. But I'm not sure who was in charge of translating their dialogue or the screenplay from French into Spanish. But it ended up being something that didn't quite sound authentically Mexican Spanish so much that viewers in Mexico didn't.

like were taken out of the fantasy of it. Not to mention all the other sort of critiques of the film's portrayal of Mexico that we could go into. But I think it's really interesting that people hyper-focused on Selena Gomez's Spanish. They're saying like, she doesn't sound like she's actually Mexican or even Mexican-American. Like her character is Mexican-American and Selena Gomez is also Mexican-American. So I was just thinking about how, well, people criticize her for her accent and

It's too gringa. It sounds so Americanized, so whitewashed. But the way that Selena Gomez speaks Mexican Spanish is like the way that she as a Mexican American speaks Spanish.

I feel like it's interesting to criticize her because as a heritage speaker, she didn't have control over her language environment. You know, she wasn't the one who decided that she would, you know, stop speaking Spanish because her family stopped speaking or whatever. I'm not sure exactly what the history was, but I feel like it's a little bit unfair to criticize her pronunciation because

while still leaving room for the fact that maybe everyone who was involved in the making of this movie could have been more careful in coming up with dialogue that sounded more authentically Mexican versus like Spain Spanish.

or maybe just working with an accent coach a little bit more. Oh, that is super interesting because yeah, I mean, at first I'm thinking, well, it sounds like they really messed up by, you know, mixing the Spain and the Mexican Spanish. But then if they're criticizing her for not speaking like a Mexican American when she is Mexican American, like that's, that's not fair. She's being authentic. They just don't like how she's authentic. Yeah.

There are Mexican-Americans whose Spanish sounds like that. Like you can't argue that Selena's pronunciation is inauthentic just because it doesn't sound like what you want Mexican-Spanish to sound like. Yeah. Well, I'm also definitely on her side because I love Only Murders in the Building, which is a podcasting show. So, you know, I feel some podcaster solidarity with her. Yeah.

And then the last movie that I wanted to comment on, this is one that I haven't seen yet, but I've heard about its controversy. This is The Brutalist. Okay. Nominated for Best Picture, Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones are nominated for Best Actor and Actress. It is, so I've heard, a fantastic movie, like a really, really cool biopic about a Hungarian refugee. Yeah.

But it is currently mired in a controversy over the use of artificial intelligence. And this was so interesting to me when I heard it. So I was told that a film editor or the film editor, someone who worked on the movie, decided that they wanted to make the scenes in which Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones speak Hungarian, not Hungarian accented English, but when they're speaking in Hungarian for a few scenes, they decided that the way that they pronounced their Hungarian vowels was not...

or realistic enough. So they used AI, an AI tool to blend their voices with the voice of a Hungarian speaker. And the result was that, oh, when they're speaking Hungarian, now they sound more like native, like, or now they sound more realistic.

And people have been really up in arms about this for a variety of reasons. Some people think like you shouldn't be using AI to make your films. Some people think like maybe it's OK to use AI, but you need to be more transparent about that, because if both of these actors are up for best best acting Oscar and voters aren't aware that, you know,

Yeah.

I don't even know. I'm not a filmmaker myself. I don't even know what I feel about the use of AI. On the one hand, like, cool, they wanted to go for more linguistic realism. But they sort of cut corners to do it. And instead of having the actors just train a little bit more or going with, you know, the actor's best shot at a Hungarian, a nice, like, native sounding or fluent sounding Hungarian accent, they just...

I don't even know if I want to call it cheating. That makes me think about, you know, if an actor dons like a prosthetic to make their nose or their face look more like someone that they're impersonating for a biopic. Is that also, you know, is that cheating in a way? When cinematographers use AI to like change the colors of a scene, they do it quickly rather than slowly, manually with whatever digital tools. Is that also cheating? Like it brings up so many questions about filmmaking and,

that I think the industry is only starting to grasp like the depth, like how deep this goes. But it was specifically in service of trying to attain linguistic realism. Wow. Which I think is a good thing, but then I don't know. That's fascinating. Do you know if they, is voice blending something that is done more manually in film? Yeah.

It's been done a lot. Yeah. Voice blending has been done. Like in the early days, voices were dubbed completely. Like you would have, I mean, this is, it goes far, even farther back than the Disney movies where like one actress would be the voice of the character and then another actress would sing.

for the character. But voice blending is pretty common. They used it in Amelia Perez to blend Carlos Sofia Gascon's voice with someone else's for the singing portions. There's a biopic about Maria Callas starring Angelina Jolie. And I've heard that AI was used to blend Angelina Jolie's voice with an actual opera singer's voice or maybe with original Maria Callas' voice. I don't even know. So this voice blending does happen.

But I think the extent to which it happens is like audiences are not really aware of, of the use of the, like the pervasiveness of the use of AI. And as an academic, someone who's, you know, you know, dealing with students all the time, trying to cut corners on their writing assignments, trying to do research more quickly without really internalizing the work that's required. I have a lot of thoughts about AI and I, you know, I obviously I can't judge my students and filmmakers based

They're in completely different worlds. But I just think that this conversation of the use of AI in movies has to be bigger. We need to be talking about it more. Oh my gosh, it's absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much, Andrew Zhang from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. You teach linguistics. Where can people find you online?

I have an academic website. If you just Google my name and the University of Hawaii and linguistics, you'll find it. It's a pretty dry website that just has a list of my academic publications. That's Andrew. C-H-E-N-G. C-H-E-N-G. That's correct. I'm also on Blue Sky and ex-formerly Twitter, mostly on Blue Sky. Don't really use either very much.

But if you ever have any questions about language, linguistics, movies, accents, whatever, like you can find me there. Wonderful. You do a lot of other interesting work. I also liked one of your studies about you studied some YouTubers and how they change their dialects. So, you know, for the main audience, this is the end of our segment. But for the Grammarpalusians who support the show, who are paid supporters of the podcast, we have a special bonus segment.

And we are going to talk about this cool YouTube study about second dialect acquisition. So if you want to support the show and sign up, you can hear that. And if you already are, thank you so much. And I'm looking forward to you hearing that conversation too. Andrew, thanks again for being here. My pleasure. Thank you. When your schedule is packed, it can be difficult to put a wholesome meal on the table. That's where HelloFresh comes in.

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Hershey's Milk Chocolate with Whole Almonds makes for a wholly amazing, wholly delicious experience that's, well, wholly Hershey's. Everyone should get to experience the satisfying surprise of a whole almond tucked inside creamy Hershey's chocolate. So don't wait your whole life to try Hershey's Milk Chocolate with Whole Almonds. And if you've already had it, then chances are you're already a lifelong fan of this confectionery delight. Find Hershey's Milk Chocolate with Whole Almonds wherever candy is sold.

Jack in the Box's new Banana French Toast Sticks starting at $2.99 are the same French toast sticks you love, now banana flavored and served with chocolate dipping sauce. So good! And another way Jack gives you so much more.