Dialects in media - a Danish example

[galingale]

This article in the Copenhagen Post caught my eye because I spent 6 weeks in Denmark a few years ago -- specifically in Aalborg, Jutland.  (The lighthouse in my icon is in Jutland.) 
http://www.cphpost.dk/culture/culture/51361-in-the-cartoon-world-if-theyre-dumb-theyre-from-jutland.html

It talks about how movies generally use "standard" Danish for

Comments

[pne]

In the German dub of Hogan's Heroes, they use accents for effect, too: Schultz has (I think) a Bavarian accent (though according to Wikipedia, the character is from Heidelberg in Baden-Württemberg) and Klink has a Saxon one.

In my opinion, the connotations of those accents work well with the personalities of the characters: a bit gemütlich on the one hand, a bit ludicrous on the other.

[lied_ohne_worte]

But generally, I'd say that in German movies, one expects people only to have a certain accent when it is actually logically that they should have it - say, if a crime series is set in Hamburg, you will have at least some people speaking a more or less pronounced variant of the local dialect, but you wouldn't expect a random Saxon or Swabian accent thrown in unless it was somehow established that the character came from the region in question. If a program isn't specifically set in a certain region, I wouldn't expect strong dialects or regional accents.

[ubykhlives]

The Harry Potter series is like that as well, and not just in the movies. Hagrid's speech is full of yeh and yer for you and your, ter for to, an' and abou' for and and about, and so on. I don't know if you'd call him a "goofball" per se, but he's certainly the kind of wild, left-of-centre character who usually gets saddled with the non-standard accent.

That said, one of the things I like about Rowling's eye dialect in the books is that she represents a quite wide range of varieties (she doesn't just pick on one non-standard form), and she makes intelligent orthographic and grammatical choices in doing it. Stan Shunpike in Prisoner of Azkaban, for instance, is a pretty bang-on representation of Cockney English.

[dcseain]

That said, one of the things I like about Rowling's eye dialect in the books is that she represents a quite wide range of varieties (she doesn't just pick on one non-standard form), and she makes intelligent orthographic and grammatical choices in doing it. Stan Shunpike in Prisoner of Azkaban, for instance, is a pretty bang-on representation of Cockney English.

You know, that's an aspect of her writing that was done such that i didn't even think about it while reading them. So, well done on her part!

[rgovrebo]

There was an article about Norwegian cartoon dubs in Bergens Tidende last month:

"Tough animals get the Bergen dialect"

The dialect of Bergen is seen as harsh and the stereotypical Bergenser is brash and obnoxious, so it fits a tough-guy image well.

[beix_brittany]

I wouldn't be qualified enough to make a thorough sociological analysis of french films but french dialects wouldn't be understood if used in films; nevertheless it's true that usually provincial or folklore-ish acccents put the characters in the non-serious category, not in the bad-boys category because bad boys have to be taken seriously as we know! But light provincial accents are welcome and give credibility to costume movies.

[showmesara]

Det er rigtigt nok. Og faktisk ret underligt.