Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 January 9

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January 9

English accent in Hollywood movies.

I am watching English movies and TV shows for few years. Nowadays, I have seen that I can understand everything without subtitles for 1950s Hollywood movies, old TV series as Get Smart 1965. But when I watch movies as Bad Boys, Lethal Weapon, then without subtitles, I don't catch what the actors say. I know those words, but without subtitle I can't recognize.

Star wars movies had easy accent, but movies based on high school students have difficult accent, and they use words and phrases not used in school books and newspapers.

Actors as Vin Diesel, Sylvester Stallone, Robin Williams, Chris Rock has difficult accent. Arnold has easy accent.

Street Hawk 1985 have easy accent, the news anchors speak with clean accent, while actors of crime movies and comedy movies don't speak clearly like news anchors.

Why old movies had easy to understand accent compared to current films? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2402:3A80:1112:6A05:90CC:B9E1:A95E:558A (talk) 09:51, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

Basically because newsreaders and announcers are expected to speak clearly, and actors in fiction used to be expected to do so. But TV and film have become more naturalistic in recent decades, and in real life many of us do not speak particularly clearly. --ColinFine (talk) 14:16, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

In old 1950s-era Finnish movies, all actors spoke loudly and clearly all the time. It feels theatrical when viewed now. Current Finnish films have the actors speaking more naturally. JIP | Talk 16:29, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Stallone can be hard enough for a native English speaker to understand. Comedians have often made fun of his tendency to mumble. Robin Williams had no discernible accent, but often he talked fast. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks in his natural Austrian accent, and that is often made fun of as well. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:15, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

See also Mid-Atlantic accent, the accent that American actors were trained to use in the first half of the 20th century. British actors were similarly trained to speak Received Pronunciation. Alansplodge (talk) 16:17, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

• In so-called real life, people sometimes mumble (whether passive-aggressively or unthinkingly), or have their backs turned when they speak, or call out from another room, or in some other way communicate ineffectively. We have the choice to ask them to repeat what they said, or just ignore it, assuming it's unimportant in the overall scheme of things. The filmmakers of today sometimes choose to reflect this reality, and I am completely in agreement with you about the frustration it often produces. Either the target audience is assumed to have the aural skills to be able to deal with these things (typically being younger people who have experience of being able to hold conversations in brain-meltingly loud clubs, bars, music venues etc **), and they don't give a damn about anyone who can't; or we're just not supposed to understand what the person said, because in RL that's often the way it is. Sometimes sub-titles actually reflect this - e.g. "(speaks indistinctly)" - but sometimes they give the words that were inaudible without the sub-titles, which is a bit aesthetically fraudulent, imo.

The particularly stupid thing about this trend is that its not actually realistic: if you were actually there talking to the person, there would probably be more clues as to what they were saying and/or easier to focus on it. And, as you say, people could ask them to repeat themselves if they missed it. IMO, dialogue should only be inaudible to the audience if it is inaudible to the characters (and maybe not even then). Iapetus (talk) 10:48, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

• Problem is, we go to a movie or the theatre to hear the dialogue, not to NOT hear it. The filmmakers of yesteryear understood this, and the directors took pains to ensure that every utterance was crisp, clear and audible. To the extent that that didn't always reflect the way things are in real life, those movies were fantasies. But given a choice between an audible fantasy and an inaudible reality, I'll take the fantasy every time.

• (** The irony is that younger people's naturally better hearing is made more acute by the need to hold conversations in such noisy environments, but that very noise/music over time has the effect of making their hearing worse than it otherwise might have become, as many studies have shown.) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:34, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

• Perhaps pedantic, but none of the people you mention actually have an English accent (which is a silly term anyway, given that there's hundreds of 'English' accents). Fgf10 (talk) 14:09, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

To clarify that last comment, the term "English accent" normally refers to the accent of someone from England (of which there are many). It might have been better to use "American accent" in this context. Alansplodge (talk) 20:17, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

As the original poster seems to me to be a non-native speaker, I took "English accent" to be short for "the natural accents of the actors when speaking English". --Khajidha (talk) 20:57, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

So did I, but as somebody else picked him up on it, I was trying to explain why. Alansplodge (talk) 12:41, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

I have a similar difficulty with French movies after, I guess, about 1980. —Tamfang (talk) 06:04, 11 January 2021 (UTC)