For a long time a pet peeve of mine has been the way language acquisition is typically portrayed in American films. One doesn't need to be a linguist to realize that Hollywood doesn't have a clue as to what it's like to really learn a foreign language. Since I have spent most of my life learning and teaching foreign languages, I think I know a thing or two about the subject. But, to be honest, one doesn't need to be a polyglot to know that, whatever the advertising industry says, learning a new language is a long hard process. My students know that too well. Yet, for some unfathomable reason, Hollywood doesn't seem to get it. It keeps churning out screenplays with scenes which fly in the face of reality. Characters learn a language in just a couple of days. Some go so far as to achieve the holy grail of language learning: they can pass themselves off as native speakers. Here you have a quick historical overview of "the problem":
- In the film The King and I (1956) it is assumed that either the British governess picks up Thai to stunning perfection or that the king of Siam and the whole court happen to speak perfect English.
- In The Untouchables (1984) Sean Connery plays a cop who supposedly managed to learn Italian from a book "in a week" to go undercover. No comments.
- In The 13th Warrior (1999) Antonio Banderas plays an Arab poet who learns to speak fluent Old Norse in a few days just by listening to warriors talk around campfires.
- In The Terminal (2004) the Tom Hanks character learns to speak fluent English by comparing two guidebooks, one written in English and the other written in Krakozhian (his mother tongue).
- In the Netflix series Ripley (2024) the main character, played by Andrew Scott, is able to hold deep philosophical conversations with native speakers after only a month in Italy.
Other unrealistic tropes still making the rounds are Hispanic characters in the U.S. who will say "gracias" for no apparent reason, characters that supposedly speak a foreign language but switch to English as soon as they have said the one stock phrase they seem to know and, of course, let's not forget that old Hollywood staple: the multilingual villain, a cliché which, at least in English-speaking countries, has reinforced the outlandish idea that speaking many languages is somehow suspicious, dangerous or flat-out evil. The defense mechanisms of monoglots can indeed be perplexing.
To be fair, in recent times many of those fantasies have fallen out of grace. Modern spectators seem to have become increasingly aware of just how ardous and time-consuming mastering a foreign language can be. They also seem to accept the fact that being a polyglot is actually quite cool. But, when it comes to accents, Hollywood still misses the mark. Spaniards are sometimes depicted as having a bad lisp (as if Spanish didn't have an S-sound!), French characters tend to have an over-the-top French accent and Central or Eastern Europeans speak in the same unplaceable, non-descript way. It looks like there is no better way of signalling how dangerous a character can be than have him display a generic Dracula-meets-Cold-War accent. Austrian? Serbian? Russian? Bulgarian? Who cares?
In the hilarious clip below Peter Stormare, a seasoned Swedish actor who's been working in Hollywood for some decades now, makes fun of all those stereotypes and openly reveals that Hollywood executives are blissfully unaware of what European accents really sound like. Enjoy.
