{"id":159802,"date":"2018-01-05T05:38:21","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T11:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/?p=159802"},"modified":"2018-01-05T05:38:21","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T11:38:21","slug":"why-do-cartoon-villains-speak-in-foreign-accents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/?p=159802","title":{"rendered":"Why Do Cartoon Villains Speak in Foreign Accents?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read it.<\/a><\/p>\n

Maybe because they’re the bad guys? That’s just a guess, you understand.<\/p>\n

Gidney, an associate professor in child study and human development at Tufts University who specializes in sociolinguistics, saw Scar\u2019s accent as part of a disturbing pattern in the film: Foreign accents and non-standard dialects were being used to voice all of the \u201cbad\u201d characters. Gidney also noticed that Scar\u2019s minions, the hyenas, spoke in either African American English or English with a Spanish accent. Gidney found this trend concerning, especially since the theme of the movie could be described as \u201cthe \u2018natural order of things,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cI thought it was really disturbing that it was necessary to \u2018take back the jungle\u2019 from the British-sounding evil lion, plus the African American-sounding and Latino-sounding hyenas.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

God forbid we should pretend that anything is ‘the natural order of things’.<\/p>\n

Gidney was inspired to embark on a study of language patterns in animated kids\u2019 entertainment, teaming up with Julie Dobrow, a senior lecturer at Tufts who specializes in issues of children and media, to study how these trends play out on kids\u2019 television shows. They\u2019ve since analyzed about 30 shows and 1,500 characters, and they\u2019re still at work on the project.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.<\/p>\n

The kicker: In many of the cases studied, villains were given foreign accents. A modern-day example is Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, the bad guy in Phineas and Ferb <\/em>who speaks in a German(ish) accent and hails from the fictional European country Drusselstein. Meanwhile, the study found that most of the heroic characters in their research sample were American-sounding; only two heroes had foreign accents. Since television is a prominent source of cultural messaging for children, this correlation of foreign accents with \u201cbad\u201d characters could have concerning implications for the way kids are being taught to engage with diversity in the United States.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ah. ‘Engage with diversity’. There you go. The proglodyte hunt for Heretics and Sinners reaches into cartoons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read it. Maybe because they’re the bad guys? That’s just a guess, you understand. Gidney, an associate professor in child study and human development at Tufts University who specializes in sociolinguistics, saw Scar\u2019s accent as part of a disturbing pattern in the film: Foreign accents and non-standard dialects were being used to voice all of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-victims"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=159802"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159803,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159802\/revisions\/159803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=159802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=159802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=159802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}