Teaching children to discriminate?
A quantitative study of linguistic representation in Disney’s “Revival Era” animated films
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/mk.v40i76.135083Keywords:
Disney, language, accent, representation, accentismAbstract
Rosina Lippi-Green’s (1997, 2012) classic quantitative study of linguistic representation in animated Disney films of the 20th century found these films to be discriminatory. Her main and most publicized finding was that characters who spoke varieties of American English tended to be morally good, while characters with a foreign accent were often evil and untrustworthy. Following a methodological discussion of Lippi-Green’s approach as it relates to our own, we investigate the degree to which her results also describe 273 characters from Disney’s successful “Revival Era,” starting with The Princess and the Frog (2009) and ending with Encanto (2021). We find, among other significant developments, that the foreign-accented characters in these more recent films are distinctively good. Also examined are other relationships between characters’ language, moral standing, gender, and age. Notably, female and younger characters tend to speak Standard American English, and they tend to be more moral than male and older characters. We end by discussing some possible causes of the main developments.
References
Baker, C. (1992). Attitudes and language. Multilingual Matters.
Baugh, J. (2005). Linguistic profiling. In A. Ball, S. Makoni, G. Smitherman, & A. K. Spears (Eds.), Black Linguistics. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203986615
Boyd, S. (2003). Foreign-born teachers in the multilingual classroom in Sweden: The role of attitudes to foreign accent. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 6(3–4), 283–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050308667786
Bresnahan, M. J., Ohashi, R., Nebashi, R., Liu, W. Y., & Morinaga Shearman, S. (2002). Attitudinal and affective response toward accented English. Language & Communication, 22(2), 171–185. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(01)00025-8
Cargile, A. C., & Giles, H. (1997). Understanding language attitudes: Exploring listener affect and identity. Language & Communication, 17(3), 195–217. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(97)00016-5
Carlson, H. K., & McHenry, M. A. (2006). Effect of accent and dialect on employability. Journal of Employment Counseling, 43(2), 70–83. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-1920.2006.tb00008.x
Clever, A. (2020). Disney, why do your villains have foreign accents? Her Campus. https://www.hercampus.com/school/psu/disney-why-do-your-villains-have-foreign-accents/
Disney, W., & Jackson, K. M. (2006). Walt Disney: Conversations (1st ed). University Press of Mississippi.
Dobrow, J. R., & Gidney, C. L. (1998). The good, the bad, and the foreign: The use of dialect in children’s animated television. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 557, 105–119. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716298557000009
Dragojevic, M., Mastro, D., Giles, H., & Sink, A. (2016). Silencing nonstandard speakers: A content analysis of accent portrayals on American primetime television. Language in Society, 45(1), 59–85. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404515000743
Drotner, K. (2002). Domesticating Disney: On children’s reception of a global media giant. In C. von Feilitzen & U. Carlsson (eds.), Children, young people and media globalisation: The UNESCO international clearinghouse on children, youth and media yearbook 2002 (pp. 111–123). Nordicom.
Dunstan, S. B., & Jaeger, A. J. (2015). Dialect and influences on the academic experiences of college students. The Journal of Higher Education, 86(5), 777–803. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhe.2015.0026
Ensslin, A. (2010). “Black and white”: Language ideologies in computer game discourse. In S. Johnson & T. M. Milani (Eds.), Language ideologies and media discourse: Texts, practices, politics (pp. 205–222). Continuum.
Fattal, I. (2018). Why do cartoon villains speak in foreign accents? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/why-do-cartoon-villains-speak-in-foreign-accents/549527/
Fought, C., & Eisenhauer, K. (2022). Language and gender in children’s animated films. Cambridge University Press.
Gill, M. F. (1994). Accent and stereotypes: Their effect on perceptions of teachers and lecture comprehension. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 22(4), 348–361. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909889409365409
Girard, F., Floccia, C., & Goslin, J. (2008). Perception and awareness of accents in young children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 26(3), 409–433. https://doi.org/10.1348/026151007X251712
Giroux, H. A., & Pollock, G. (2010). The Mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence (2nd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.
Gluszek, A., & Dovidio, J. F. (2010). Speaking with a nonnative accent: Perceptions of bias, communication difficulties, and belonging in the United States. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(2), 224–234. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X09359590
Goorimoorthee, T., Csipo, A., Carleton, S., & Ensslin, A. (2019). Language ideologies in videogame discourse: Forms of sociophonetic othering in accented character speech. In A. Ensslin & I. Balteiro (Eds.), Approaches to videogame discourse: Lexis, interaction, textuality (pp. 269–287). Bloomsbury Academic.
Hanssen, F. A., & Fleck, R. K. (2012). Persistence and change in age-specific gender gaps: Hollywood actors from the Silent Era onward. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2169573
Hine, B., England, D., Lopreore, K., Horgan, E. S., & Hartwell, L. (2018). The rise of the androgynous princess: Examining representations of gender in prince and princess characters of Disney movies released 2009–2016. Social Sciences, 7(12), Article 245. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7120245
Hodson, J. (2014). Dialect in film and literature. Red Globe Press.
Hurley, D. L. (2005). Seeing White: Children of color and the Disney fairy tale princess. The Journal of Negro Education, 74(3), 221–232.
Karshner, R., & Stern, D. (1990). Dialect monologues. Dramaline.
Kaufman, J. B. (1988). Three little pigs–big little picture. American Cinematographer, 69(11), 38–44.
Kinzler, K. D. (2020). How you say it: Why you talk the way you do and what it says about you. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Kinzler, K. D., Corriveau, K. H., & Harris, P. L. (2011). Children’s selective trust in native-accented speakers. Developmental Science, 14(1), 106–111. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00965.x
Kinzler, K. D., Dupoux, E., & Spelke, E. S. (2007). The native language of social cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(30), 12577–12580. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0705345104
Kinzler, K. D., Dupoux, E., & Spelke, E. S. (2012). “Native” objects and collaborators: Infants’ object choices and acts of giving reflect favor for native over foreign speakers. Journal of Cognition and Development, 13(1), 67–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2011.567200
Kinzler, K. D., Shutts, K., DeJesus, J., & Spelke, E. S. (2009). Accent trumps race in guiding children’s social preferences. Social Cognition, 27(4), 623–634. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2009.27.4.623
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Schmidt, S. H. (2019). Disney’s shifting visions of villainy from the 1990s to the 2010s: A biocultural analysis. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 3(2), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.26613/esic.3.2.140
Kozloff, S. (2000). Overhearing film dialogue. University of California Press.
Ladegaard, H. J., & Sachdev, I. (2006). “I like the Americans… But I certainly don't aim for an American accent”: Language attitudes, vitality and foreign language learning in Denmark. Journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 27(2), 91–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434630608668542
Lindemann, S. (2003). Koreans, Chinese or Indians? Attitudes and ideologies about non-native English speakers in the United States. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(3), 348–364. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00228
Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. Routledge.
Lippi-Green, R. (2012). English with an accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Li-Vollmer, M., & LaPointe, M. E. (2003). Gender transgression and villainy in animated film. Popular Communication, 1(2), 89–109. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15405710PC0102_2
Luhman, R. (1990). Appalachian English stereotypes: Language attitudes in Kentucky. Language in Society, 19(3), 331–348. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500014548
Muir, R. (2023). The Disney Princess phenomenon: A feminist analysis. Bristol University Press.
Putnam, A. (2013). Mean ladies: Transgendered villains in Disney films. In J. Cheu (Ed.), Diversity in Disney films: Critical essays on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and disability (pp. 147–162). MacFarland.
Queen, R. (2013). Working with performed language: Movies, television, and music. In C. Mallinson, B. Childs, & G. Van Herk (Eds.), Data collection in sociolinguistics: Methods and applications (pp. 217–227). Routledge.
Robinson, T., & Anderson, C. (2006). Older characters in children’s animated television programs: A content analysis of their portrayal. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 50(2), 287–304. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem5002_7
Ryan, E. (1983). Social psychological mechanisms underlying native speaker evaluations of non-native speech. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 5(2), 148-159. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263100004824
Sønnesyn, J. (2011). The use of accents in Disney’s animated feature films 1995-2009: A sociolinguistic study of the good, the bad and the foreign (MA thesis) [Bergen University]. https://bora.uib.no/bora-xmlui/bitstream/handle/1956/5356/82634254.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
The Walt Disney Company. (n.d.). Disney Social Responsibility. Disney Social Responsibility. Retrieved June 17, 2022, from https://impact.disney.com/
Towbin, M. A., Haddock, S. A., Zimmerman, T. S., Lund, L. K., & Tanner, L. R. (2004). Images of gender, race, age, and sexual orientation in Disney feature-length animated films. Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, 15(4), 19–44. https://doi.org/10.1300/J086v15n04_02
Trudgill, P. (2000). Sociolinguistics: An introduction to language and society (4th ed). Penguin.
Wasko, J. (2001). Understanding Disney: The manufacture of fantasy. Polity.
Wellman, N. S. (2020). Disney’s portrayal of women: An analysis of female villains and princesses. Concordia Journal of Communication Research, 7, Article 4. https://doi.org/10.54416/SEUY6814
Wolfram, W., & Schilling, N. (2016). American English: Dialects and variation (3rd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Author and journal
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright Author and Journal.
Articles published after January 1 2024 are licensed under CCBY 4.0.
Articles published until December 31 2023 are licensed under CCBYNCND.
Articles submitted to MedieKultur should not be submitted to or published in other journals.
