So in American media of all types, while obviously not a hard rule, there's plenty of examples of foreign accents being used to communicate tropes or personalities to the audience.

British accents for upper class characters, German accents for scientist type characters, and so on.

In your language, what are the typical accents used and what are they used for?

Thanks in advance.


10 comments

  1. I never notice something similar here in The Netherlands. How does this works? A latino scientist character suddenly speaks English with a German accent to emphasize the character is a scientist?

  2. Nowhere near to that extent, no. Accents can of course occur, but they will have more specific uses. And being a language with few foreign speakers, we also don’t have the same pool of accents to draw on from common association – you know exactly how stereotypical Hinglish may sound, but what on earth would be the equivalent of Hindi and Danish (as an example)?

  3. We have our own dialects in our language, so those are used. Usually a bit stereotypically too, with non-official dialects being the “funny” guys, random people, etc, and the official for the main character and main villain..

    Foreign accents of our language, if the character is foreign, yes, we use that too..

  4. No, actually. Mocking people for their accents is not considered a sign of quality media in Europe.

  6. Polish accent for Polish characters, Ukrainian for Ukrainian characters, American for American…

  7. The only time I can remember anyone putting on an accent was during the broadcasted stage play of *[‘Allo ‘Allo!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Allo_%27Allo!)*.

    It was hard to watch, even though everyone were famous actors with lifelong experience.

    So I dare say that putting on an accents is quite rare.

  8. There are some tropes here in Italy, like the German mad scientist with an atrocious German accent, but normally the character itself is of that nationality, not just the accent.

    So the vamp with french accent will also smoke, have very short straight hairs and a long personal history with half the criminality of central Europe (maybe even a connection with La Resistance if the media is older), the brutish criminal will have a slave accent but also blonde hair, very pale skin and a preference for Kalashnikovs, and so on.

    There are also some tropes about our internal accents, like the mason from Bergamo or the businessman from Milano, but they are complete characters, not just accents. In “Cells at work – Black” when the body got a blood transfusion the new red cells have a strong accent to signify that they came from a different body, but while I like it, it was very jarring to see two people very similar talking with two different accents.

    Sometimes the TV is more real than reality, seeing as half my colleagues talk with strong south accents. XD

  9. I’m not even sure we do this in the UK! Can’t think of any British shows which use different foreign accents to stereotype character profiles, all the English-language ones I can think of are American

  10. I think in Hungary we use wording more than accents to express a stereotype – the scientist will use obnoxious scientific sounding phrases, the lawyer will talk legalese, the trophy girl would sound all seductive, etc. These kind off “accents” often wouldn’t even come through in dubs, only if it’s important to the storyline (or the joke). Or if its only a sentence or two.

    The only two exception i can think of in local productions is foreign gang members, who will 50/50 sound italian or russian, and the poor uneducated lowlife type character who will often have some emphasised countryside dialect. 

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