Appunti esame lingua inglese III, docente Ranzato

Dialect in film and literature

J. Hodson discusses how when a speaker changes style in response to a particular situation, this is known as style-shifting. Style-shifting refers to an alternation between styles of speech within a single language, whereas code-switching (CS) often refers to switching between languages. Sociolinguists, including Coupland, have argued that such a distinction is difficult to maintain in practice, and that ordinary everyday conversations may have highly performative aspects. Real-world speech is distinct from literary or filmic speech.

Style-shifting in characters

When a character style-shifts in a fictional film or text, we need to ask, "What the author or filmmakers were trying to communicate and what the reader or audience understood from the style shift."

In literature, the representation of dialect is necessarily impressionistic and frequently inconsistent. Emotional style-shifts, interpersonal style-shifts, and transformative shifts include:

• Emotional style-shifting occurs when a character is surprised, upset, or otherwise disturbed from their normal emotional state. Characters become more dialectal when under pressure.
• Interpersonal style-shifting: A frequently observed process is convergence, whereby speakers alter their speech style so that it becomes like that of the person they are addressing. Linguistic accommodation may occur spontaneously and pass without mention. However, in literature and films where issues of identity, power, and prestige are particularly salient, writers and filmmakers often find ways to highlight interpersonal style-shift, as in the scene. As well as convergence, it is also possible to find situations in which speakers adopt a strategy of linguistic divergence from their addressee.
• Transformative style-shifting describes a situation where someone, by shifting to a new language variety, brings about a change in their circumstance. The language variety should not be one that anyone in the scene is currently using. Their central argument was that the individual creates for himself the patterns of his linguistic behavior to resemble those of the group or groups with which from time to time he wishes to be identified. It does not require either that speakers are natural members of the group they wish to identify with, or that they are in active communication with someone from that group. Several researchers have drawn on the Acts of Identity framework to examine why and how British singers have so often adopted American features when performing pop songs. Transformative style-shifting is often used to depict a wily and resistant character, who can renegotiate the social situation in which they find themselves by projecting a new identity.

The characters greet one another in formal Urdu ("Salam alykum" was borrowed into Urdu from Arabic). The rest of the scene is in English, but there are multiple varieties of English at play. For example, George speaks in a Pakistani-Manchester dialect, Mrs. Shah speaks in a Pakistani-RP dialect, and Annie speaks in a broad Manchester dialect. It is a marker of politeness: she welcomes the Shahs into her home in their own language. Secondly, it may also be understood as an attempt to integrate herself into the forthcoming discussion because, as the only non-Pakistani of the four parents, she is in danger of being marginalized.

East in East is interesting for the subtle ways in which it explores a second-generation Pakistani-English experience, and its use of language variety to do so. To conclude, style-shifting communicates information about the emotional state, relationships, and identity of characters.

Code-switching in the Italian dubbed version of British and American multilingual films

Monti discusses how code-switching (CS), or "la commutazione di codice", is the passage from one language to another within the discourse of a single speaker, not to be confused with bilingualism or diglossia. From a linguistic point of view, switching from one code to another can be interphrasal (if it occurs at the boundary between two sentences) or intraphrasal (if it occurs within the same sentence). From a functional point of view, changing code in discourse can have a communicative purpose. The switching can occur between Italian and one of the local dialects or minority languages, but also between Italian and another language in situations of emigration.

Movies

• Bend It Like Beckham
• My Big Fat Greek Wedding
• Real Women Have Curves
• Ae Fond Kiss
• Spanglish
• Gran Torino
• My Life in Ruins

They express their bicultural identity through a symbolic use of linguistic variation. Issues of multilingualism and language variation on the screen are inherently tied to the concept of audiovisual translation, intended as a transcoding process focused not merely on language transfer but also on cultural adaptation.