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Change in the television/film era | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Music, Movies, TV & Radio |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4948 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 5 26 January 2013 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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Borrowing from that other thread about accents in movies about prior centuries, I was wondering if in your native languages there is a clear shift between a movie from the 1930s and 1940s, vs a movie today.
First of all, in both English and Spanish, many movies from the "golden age" of Hollywood, or the golden age of Argentine cinema (roughly the same period, 1930s, 1940s), had heavily affected accents... histrionic or melodramatic stage accents I call them, but I'm not sure. I guess because back them many movie actors were just transplanted stage actors, right? Like when you hear Shirley Temple talk, I really have a hard time believing that's how she really spoke outside the set... or did she? Also, many early American television shows had a THICK New York accent, or so it appears to me, especially the men. Almost obnoxious to be honest. Are those things the same in other languages? I haven't watched any old films in my target languages yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4357 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 2 of 5 26 January 2013 at 10:07pm | IP Logged | ||
I love a THICK New York accent of that era! As for the british English, I assume that accent has changed dramatically in the past 100 years, judging from some old recordings. There are some in youtube I believe. But they are mostly of upperclass people so maybe I'm wrong. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6908 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 5 26 January 2013 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, same thing in Sweden. The way people spoke in the 40s/50s was different from the 60s, the 70s and so on. And especially compared to today. It isn't all about vocabulary. It might have had to do with the kind of movies (comedy, drama etc.), the (social) setting, the director.... maybe the sound quality and the kind of(/lack of?) background music. I mean, the oldest Swedish movies I've seen (from the 30s/40s) have had the same kind of sound (resonance? frequence?) as British and American movies (and musical recordings) from the same era.
Just a few weeks ago, there was a post or two about the accent/way of speech in a Swedish TV series from the 1960s. I wouldn't be surprised if other countries had a slightly different "movie accent". Nobody speaks like Cary Grant or James Stewart anymore, right? Maybe all the actors came from the place or social background (unlikely, but not impossible). With the Swedish posts in mind, almost no kid actor spoke anything else than a "Stockholm" accent, regardless of where the film was supposed to take place. In some rare occasions where the setting has been of greatest importance, an entire cast have had to learn another accent. Without success. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5129 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 4 of 5 27 January 2013 at 12:04am | IP Logged | ||
I've mentioned this elsewhere, and I wish I had a link for it, but the BBC did a great documentary on how the Queen's English (literally, the way the Queen speaks) has changed over the decades. Her English has come much closer to middle-class English. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kronos Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5260 days ago 186 posts - 452 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 5 of 5 27 January 2013 at 12:42am | IP Logged | ||
Same here with old German films of that period, whereas the intonation in current movies is much more natural. Apart from those stage accents the scripts of the 1930s/40s productions sometimes had artifical sounding snippets of dialog, though the current TV productions are probably not better in that respect. In everyday life people did of course not speak in this theatrical manner at all. There are many extant live recordings of informal conversations etc. of that era, and on those people speak just as they do now. What never ceases to amaze me is that there is almost no difference to the current colloquial German, so that sometimes I find it hard to believe that they are really 70 or 80 years old, since my whole aural exposure to that era has been via movies, records, old newsreels etc., and in none of them people sounded really natural. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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